Page 1 of The Immortalists

PROLOGUE

The Woman on Hester Street

1969

Varya

Varya is thirteen.

New to her are three more inches of height and the dark patch of fur between her legs. Her breasts are palm sized, her nipples pink dimes. Her hair is waist length and medium brown—not the black of her brother Daniel’s or Simon’s lemon curls, not Klara’s glint of bronze. In the morning, she plaits it in two French braids; she likes the way they whisk her waist, like horses’ tails. Her tiny nose is no one’s, or so she thinks. By twenty, it will have risen to assume its full, hawkish majesty: her mother’s nose. But not yet.

They wind through the neighborhood, all four of them: Varya, the eldest; Daniel, eleven; Klara, nine; and Simon, seven. Daniel leads the way, taking them down Clinton to Delancey, turning left at Forsyth. They walk the perimeter of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, keeping to the shade beneath the trees. At night, the park turns rowdy, but on this Tuesday morning there are only a few clumps of young people sleeping off the previous weekend’s protests, their cheeks pressed to the grass.

At Hester, the siblings become quiet. Here they must pass Gold’s Tailor and Dressmaking, which their father owns, and though it is not likely he’ll see them—Saul works with total absorption, as if what he is sewing is not the hem of a men’s pant leg but the fabric of the universe—he is still a threat to the magic of this muggy July day and its precarious, trembling object, which they have come to Hester Street to find.

Though Simon is the youngest, he’s quick. He wears a pair of handed-down jean shorts from Daniel, which fit Daniel at the same age but sag around Simon’s narrow waist. In one hand, he carries a drawstring bag made of a chinoiserie fabric. Inside, dollar bills rustle and coins shimmy their tin music.

“Where is this place?” he asks.

“I think it’s right here,” Daniel says.

They look up at the old building—at the zigzag of the fire escapes and the dark, rectangular windows of the fifth floor, where the person they have come to see is said to reside.

“How do we get inside?” Varya asks.

It looks remarkably like their apartment building, except that it’s cream instead of brown, with five floors instead of seven.

“I guess we ring the buzzer,” Daniel says. “The buzzer for the fifth floor.”

“Yeah,” says Klara, “but which number?”

Daniel pulls a crumpled receipt out of his back pocket. When he looks up, his face is pink. “I’m not sure.”

“Daniel!” Varya leans against the wall of the building and flaps a hand in front of her face. It’s nearly ninety degrees, hot enough for her hairline to itch with sweat and her skirt to stick to her thighs.

“Wait,” Daniel says. “Let me think for a second.”

Simon sits down on the asphalt; the drawstring purse sags, like a jellyfish, between his legs. Klara pulls a piece of taffy from her pocket. Before she can unwrap it, the door to the building opens, and a young man walks out. He wears purple-tinged glasses and an unbuttoned paisley shirt.

He nods at the Golds. “You want in?”

“Yes,” says Daniel. “We do,” and he is scrambling to his feet as the others follow him, he is walking inside and thanking the man with the purple glasses before the door shuts—Daniel, their fearless, half-inept leader whose idea this was.

• • •

He heard two boys talking last week while in line for the kosher Chinese at Shmulke Bernstein’s, where he intended to get one of the warm egg custard tarts he loves to eat even in the heat. The line was long, the fans whirring at top speed, so he had to lean forward to listen to the boys and what they said about the woman who had taken up temporary residence at the top of a building on Hester Street.

As he walked back to 72 Clinton, Daniel’s heart skipped in his chest. In the bedroom, Klara and Simon were playing Chutes and Ladders on the floor while Varya read a book in her top bunk. Zoya, the black-and-white cat, lay on the radiator in a square frame of sun.

Daniel laid it out for them, his plan.

“I don’t understand.” Varya propped a dirty foot up on the ceiling. “What exactly does this woman do?”

“I told you.” Daniel was hyper, impatient. “She has powers.”

“Like what?” asked Klara, moving her game piece. She’d spent the first part of the summer teaching herself Houdini’s rubber-band card trick, with limited success.

“What I heard,” said Daniel, “is she can tell fortunes. What’ll happen in your life—whether you’ll have a good one or a bad one. And there’s something else.” He braced his hands in the door frame and leaned in. “She can say when you’ll die.”