This is a story about storytelling. It is my way of telling the truth about a story that may be interlaced with lies but they are lies only in the way true lovers give each other the lie when they say: “I’ll love you till the day I die.”

I knew a man who was born in a peasant village in Galicia, close to the Polish border. By the time he was nineteen he had worked his way to Vladivostok and then to Siberia. “Up there,” he said, “the snow got deep. Men stole food, and then one man killed another and the police locked the murderer in a cage with the corpse. The starving man went so crazy he ate his dead man before he died, too. The police left the cage in the forest. In the spring, when the trees were in flower, birds built nests in the bones.”

He came home to his village and worked as a stable hand. He thought he might join the army but then he saw a small poster, a hand-bill that said: COME TO SASKATCHEWAN. He told me: “Because I didn’t know where it was, I went.”

He sailed for Canada.

He worked on the prairies and for a while he lived with four other farm laborers in a one room boor-day, a sod hut, half-underground.

“It was strange,” he said, “it was like living together in your own grave.”

At the same time, a young Ukrainian girl arrived by boat in Montreal. In her home village, and old priest had made her sister pregnant. She thought he was going to make her pregnant, too. She had come to Montreal to marry a shoemaker. It was an arranged marriage. The shoemaker wasn’t there. He didn’t show up. Someone took her from the docks and gave her a bag of sandwiches and put her on a train for Saskatchewan.

Five days alone by train, two thousand miles.

A girl who couldn’t speak English,

The Galician was working there on a farm.

She went to work on the same farm.

He heard his boss sing:

Works like donkey,

looks like monkey,

must be honky,

They came to Toronto, got married and had a daughter.

“We made a nest,” he said.

He was a man of stamina, of stoic courage. He worked as a plumber. He pressed pants. He set pins in bowling alleys. He was a barber. He laid cobblestones between the city streetcar tracks.

He saved his money and bought a small house.

Then, he got sick, a terrible arthritis in his spine. Doctors fused his vertebrae together to ease the pain.

He couldn’t turn his head.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “I never look back.”

Over the next forty years, in pain, he often could not work. He had to stay home, sitting upright in his chair, and he read books, novels in Russian ordered by surface mail from Moscow, a people’s press, newsprint pages and cardboard covers.

He said he liked Tolstoy. He felt Tolstoy was talking music to him. He didn’t like Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was just talking, talking.

His wife kept a cat, and kept a canary in a cage. It made her smile, watching the car watch the bird. She was amused by the steadfast stillness of the cat’s yearning. She was pleased by the bird’s chirping. She talked to the bird.

The daughter got married.

In the year his daughter gave him a grandson, two of his farm labor friends from the old country who had lived with him in the sod hut in Saskatchewan died. Their names were in the local Ukrainian newspaper.

His wife had cataracts in her eyes so he read the death notices aloud to his wife. She was strong but she could hardly see and didn’t realize that she had left the canary cage door open. The bird flew around the house and then out the back door.

“A bird flying in the house,” he said, “means death.”

But he grew older and older.

Though he grew feeble and hardly slept.

A deeper pain had nested in his bones as he sat upright staring straight ahead. “I know how to do a hundred things,” he said, “but I don’t know how to die.”

Two weeks later, he died, though he still didn’t know how to die because he died in his sleep.

He had almost never talked about his life. He had never looked back. He certainly didn’t know how to tell his story.

So, I have told his story, and the story is how he will be remembered.

It is who he will be.

Is it who he was?

I don’t know.

Details may be wrong, but what is worth knowing the story is entirely true. If details are wrong then they are lies that enhance the truth and the more layered such lies the more biting the truth.

Such is art.

Such was a man called Paul Rabchuk.

This is how I know him.

Now you know him, too.

What are the implications of this story?

That story begins in memory and memory is not the end but the beginning of a story.
And what does this say about history? It says something as old as Aristotle: that history is an assemblage of facts, the bits and pieces of time past, with a tinge of the present, and little more.
A story, though, is a shaping of the facts, a molding act of the imagination.

And the imagination, said Jacques Maritain, approaches metaphysics, that is, it approaches first truths.

Where does the imagination begin?

In memory, with the story.

Let me put what I mean in another way, by saying something about one of the greatest stories ever told.

I was bred in the bone as a Catholic. I went to a parochial school, I studied the lives of the saints, I sang in the choir and learned to sing in Latin but did not learn what Latin meant.

I learned the liturgy and what all the colors of the mass vestments signified –from death to resurrection- but I did not read the old and new testaments.

Catholics did not read the Bible stories.

That’s how all the Protestants like Luther and Calvin had got into trouble, by reading the Bible stories for themselves.

I did not get into trouble until late in life.

I sat down and read the Genesis story.

I didn’t know what to expect so I read all the little chapters of the story as if it were the memoirs of the Jews.

And with the first chapter, I knew something unexpected was afoot. I had always been told that the Great Beginning had begun with the light, and then there was the garden, and Adam and Eve and the first temptation, the apple, the snake, sin, shame, and the expulsion from Eden –and we were the children of the expelled, trying to shed sin and shame in this vale of tears so that we could go back over the garden wall, which is death, and get into the garden again.
It’s a good story and Christians have stuck to it.

But there is an extraordinary twist to the story, because the man is unnamed and the woman was there before Eve. She wasn’t born from Adam’s rib, or the other man’s rib.

She was her own woman, equal, and she looked around and said, “This place is for the birds,” dismissing the God of light and lightning bolts, and the garden. She went over the wall and took the name Lilith. He went over the wall, too, and disappeared.

Then the story starts all over again.

This time with the rib and Eve, and this time everything and everyone in the story is under control.

But where did that woman Lilith go? Who was she? Is she still out there, indifferent to all the patriarchal prating that goes on through all the stories in the Bible? Did she break out of the bondage of death forever?

The idea of breaking out of bondage, of passing over, led me to read the Exodus story. Ever year, Jews celebrate the Passover, the coming out of Egypt. They celebrate the story as a truth that lies at the core of their being Jews.

But what is the story?

People of an historical bent, who need to believe in facts before they can believe in believe itself, have had a hard time with this passing over story.

Were the Jews really in Egypt? Where and when did the Red Sear part?

Where is the mountain where Moses talked to God?

What is manna? And was it a gift from God?

There are hundreds of bible cops out there on the beat, saying, “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

Such a man wrote a book called The Bible As History. It was a best seller because he had lined up all the facts like little ducks and he had worked out all the answers, even for the mystery of manna.

Manna, he said, was the pure white sweet-tasting excrement that certain desert insects left, and still leave, on foliage during the night.

That, he said, as if he had proven something triumphant and profound, something to bolster the faith, was what the wandering Israelites ate for breakfast –insect shit sweet to the tongue, and full of protein, too.

He, like other fundamentalists and creationists, piled up literal facts to justify a literal reading of the story, insisting he could prove that Moses had actually crossed over in a certain year, that Moses and his several thousands of men, women and children had actually marched around Sinai for forty years, that the sun had actually stood still and trumpets had actually blown down the walls around Jericho.

But wait a minute.

The Egyptians were extraordinary book keepers, and we know how to read all their hieroglyphic records. They kept track of every camel herder who crossed the Sinai desert. There is no mention of Moses or his army prepping for pitched battle around Jericho. As a matter of fact, the chosen people are singled out for mention only once in the whole mass of Egyptian records -a passing reference to the mountain town of Jerusalem.

And as I read this story for the first time I asked myself: “Forty years! How big is the Sinai?” The fact is, the Sinai is so small you can walk across it in four days. So what were they doing out there for forty years? Where were they hiding? Were they the greatest vanishing act in history?

Was Moses some kind of faux Bismarck? Were they ever actually there?

In asking these questions, am I inviting a laughter that belittles the story? Absolutely not. The story is intact in my imagination. It is intact in the imagination of the Jews.

But I am belittling the fundamentalists who insist that a story must be literally true in its factual details if its great truth is to be trusted.

Aristotle had their number.

Chronological detail, he said, is a low level of awareness. A telephone book has chronology.

But the imagination gives shape to the experience that is inherent in the form of the story.

Like a bee, a story becomes itself.

Like a bee, a story gets in your bonnet.

It becomes what it is in your memory. The memory of passing out of bondage is central to the being of all Jews. They did not know who they were until they had got their story straight. Every year, at Passover, by entering into memory they begin again. That’s what Passover is, a story renovated through ritual from generation to generation, and the details may be historically true to past time or not, and borrowed from other past tribes or not, but who the Jews are is, and the way they discover who they are and affirm who they are does not end with a memory but begins in memory.

That’s their great story as they remember it and they are sticking to it, to the truth in it, the coming out of bondage into a freedom. And in my own memory, that is Paul Rabchuk’s story, too. Coming out of the bondage of Russia into the open expanse of Saskatchewan, going there because he didn’t know where there was.

Paul Rabchuk and his four friend were hard working men. They had promised each other in the dank light of a prairie boorday that they would be millionaires before they died.

Years passed. Two of the men died as millionaires. Their children became chiropractors.
Paul worked hard but he also stayed home a lot, week after week, locked in pain, staring straight ahead. he was well-off but he was not rich.

He had nothing to do so he read books. Tolstoy, Turgeniev, Dostoievski, Chekhow.

Babel.

When he wasn’t reading, he went for long walks in a great park that was across from his house, High Park.

Then his two living friends retired. They were millionaires. Their children became chiropractors. Paul, because he was not a millionaire, read books and went for walks.

Months passed and he did not hear from his friends.

Paul said he felt very alone, and then he told me this story.

He got a phone call.

Leonid had tried to kell himself and Boris was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

They met in the park. Paul was astonished. his friends looked haggard and broken, like homeless men.

“How?” they asked.

“How what?”

“How are you so calm?”

He gave them Tolstoy’s stories.

Over the months, they sat on a long bench by Grenadier Pond in the south end of the park where several swans swam in the water. They fed bread crusts to the swans. Boris was reading Babel and Leonid was reading Dostoievski, even the letters.

They read for hours without stopping.

Leonid kissed Paul on the cheek.

“I owe you,” he said “you can punch me.”

“Why would I punch you?” Paul asked.

“If you meet a stupid man,” Boris said, “beat him. He will know the reason why.” They kept on talking, week after week, telling each other the stories they had read. “That was good. I tell you true.”

Then one day Boris said, “I’ll tell you a story. About my father and some other men who’d been arrested. By someone’s command. And they made one man undress and he was missing a leg so they took his crutch.”

How do you know this?

“Because the mother of one of the men kept a whore-house in Minsk and I used to go there.”

“And they took his crutch?”

“And another man had lost an arm and they took his artificial limb.”

“The bastards.”

“And they told him they wouldn’t feed him if he complained.”

“Didn’t someone have to sign for the arm?”

My father… He signed, and he said to them, “Somebody turns in a leg, another an arm, so I’ll give you an eye. And he gave them his porcelain right eye.”

“Your father had a porcelain eye?”

“Even I couldn’t tell till he told me, the eye was such a good match.”

Paul thought maybe this was true story and maybe it was made up or maybe it was borrowed, but he didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t want to offend his friend. Boris went on and said, “Father, standing naked, told them, pretty soon you’ll have all the body parts you need. And they said, What is there you won’t give up? and he said, my soul, you can’t have my soul.”

“And your father told you that story?” Leonid asked.

“True.”

“I think I read a story like that somewhere,” Paul told him.

“Good,” Boris said “If someone else told the same story, then it must be even more true.”
They sat on the bench in silence, tossing bread to the swans who honked, waiting to be fed.

After Paul died and was cremated, I told my father his story. He was sitting facing me, and his eyes were alive like a child’s because he was not only listening to the story but he was beginning to let in play in his imagination, beginning to see it in his own way. But what was his way, and how would he make it his own and yet keep it true to what I had told him, and true to what Paul had told me, and to what Boris had told Paul, so that someone hearing the story would say, “how true.”

To make any story like this into a true story demands a curious eye, a cold eye. Not ruthless, but a Jens eye unmoved by the impediment of emotion. The kind of eye that Morley had. He could look at me that way, and often did. And at my mother. That, of course, was the distance I always felt in him. The distance that allowed him to take our intimate private moments and put them in his stories, on the public page for his own purposes. He looked at himself that way. Unflinching. By temperament.

There is an astonishing scene in his story. A Passion in Rome, astonishing to anyone who knew my mother who suffered for years from a terrifically painful disease, tic douloureux, the most painful on all neurological afflictions, and it is a scene in which the lovers are in Rome in a rented flat over a shop and they have been through a night of sexual ecstasy, a night of cries and moans, the same kind of cries and moans that my mother made in her agonies –followed by a fierce wrangling and loud recrimination. In the morning, in the story, to mollify the old landlady, the man tells his lover what to write in a note: “We are sure you were alarmed by the cry of pain you must have heard last night… I have a neuralgia of the face, and old disease. Perhaps you have heard of it. It is called tic douloureux. It strikes me suddenly. The pain, as doctors know is unbearable. I am ashamed that I cry out…”

What, I wondered, did my mother think of that? Not only a little lie told by the characters, but her pain masked a sexual ecstasy. This was a world where the lens eye of the writer, your husband, could steal your thoughts, your shame, your soul.

Then, in the year after I returned home from my honeymoon I had a casual conversation with my father in which I told him about the first little fights I had had on the road with my new wife, Nina Rabchuck, Paul’s daughter. Later, in Morley’s story, A Fine And Private Place, I read:

He had her arm and felt her shoulder go up stiffly. Then he knew that she felt neglected and he trembled with resentment. Rome was the loveliest of all the cities, and here she was, wanting to be treated as the only really lovely thing in Rome. From then on, he was aware of other surprising little oppositions. He liked wandering at loose ends: unexpected ruins, restaurants, boutiques, tie shops and churches –they all deighted him. Then, if he suddenly wanted to cross the road, she argued: It wasn’t where they had planned to cross. In Christ’s name, what does in matter? And he was harsh with her, for there seemed to be a map in her head which only she knew and he couldn’t know; if they didn’t follow the secret map, everything would go to pieces.

I remember thinking. What a remarkable memory, what remarkable reporting of what I had said, but he knew and I knew –and perhaps Nina Knew, too- that a private moment in my marriage had been seen through the lens of his eye and then laid bare on the page.
Yes I never said a word.

He stared at me. I stared at him.

It is dangerous to stare, to look upon four father, and even more dangerous to go into his tent and see him naked.

I did.

I looked at him with my own curious eye –and it was at the worst of moments- when we both thought he was about to be told he had cancer –a curious eye unmoved by the impediment of emotion.

Morley sat down one day and read in my story, The Way The Angel Spread Her Wings, about the afternoon we went together to Wellesley Hospital to see if he had cancer. The character in my novel is called Adam, and he goes with his father, who is called Web,

and as his father undressed in the cubicle in the hospital’s emergency room he thought I don’t want to see him stripped down, defenseless: years ago I wanted him dead but now I don’t want him defenseless. His father stood barefoot on the gray marble floor, naked, talking about baseball as if nothing were the matter, as if they were in neutral space, all emotion neutered, and neither spoke of a silent unseen tumor, nor said the dreaded work, cancer, the big C. But only stared at the yellow, purple, pink, sepia blood in rippled layers, a relief map under his translucent skin, all the places he’d been, the altitudes. But the doctor, a young man wearing steelrimmed glasses, shrugged and smiled as Web sat up on the brown rubber sheet of the examining table, his slightly bowed legs dangling and his penis is so small, remembering when he was a child in the bathroom, his father standing over the toilet, his penis between two fingers, thick, so big, so heavy and now it looked like his memory of his own childhood penis, small, hooded, shriveled by fear, his only sign of fear, and why am I looking at his penis? When it is actually his boney feet, the long bony yellow toes and toenails that appal me, the hard yellow nails and the thin shins and crinkled blue veins and the flesh hanging loose under his arms like a woman’s, the little womanly tits with tufts of hair around the small nipples (why do men have nipples? What taunting sign of ineffectuality, lost powers, sign of the lost rib and laughing lightly, Adam said, “Goddamn, you sure look like the resurrection of the dead to me”).

Morely never said a word about that passage.

He never said whether it was accurate or false; he only said that the prose of the novel was very sensual, that it was not the way he wrote. No, not at all…

Yet in the years before his death, writer to writer, stealing from each other’s lives, stealing and shaping little lies to tell larger truths, we ended up yielding in a complete and silent trust our private moments to each other’s story-telling devices and public scrutiny.

Perhaps that was a nakedness beyond facts, beyond a kiss, beyond sensuality. Beyond even trust, since it was neither asked for nor given.

Perhaps that was our passing over, our coming out of bondage into a love, the telling of lies that told a story that enhanced the truth of how it was with us.