Count

      I heard there was a Count.

      Not a head count or a body count.  And not even a decent discount.  I mean an actual Count somewhere up there on the tangled branches of the family tree.  This one was on my father’s side but I knew that he and his brothers were a bunch of taletellers, so I could not be sure.

      I had no photo, no evidence of any kind, but I took the notion with me like a clue and went to visit my Uncle Leo at his apartment overlooking the ocean in Long Beach.  Leo was my father’s younger brother but I had not stayed in touch with him much, though he wanted me to.  He had not been around when I was a kid and later on I never thought there was enough of my old man in him to make him interesting.  But I was curious enough about this one story to contact him again.

      After lunch, after the usual jokes about old Jews and sex, after that endless story about the woman who was dictating her memoirs to him because even at his age he still had a steady hand, after the deluge and the Ice Age and the return of life on earth, I finally got to ask him the question I came for.

      “Yes!” he said triumphantly.

      Leo was thin, almost frail, and had a neck like a turtle.  Yet somehow the idea of this   made him plumper, bolder, less reptilian altogether.

      “He was a Rabinowitz?” I asked, referring to the family name before it was changed.

      That was a flub on my part at which he scowled, as he always did.  Shook his head as usual.  Then he corrected me with great puffery as he did every single time I said the name that way.

      “Rabin-OH-vitch!” he insisted. 

      “I know,” I said and repeated it properly for the umpteemth time.

      “It’s Russian.  It became Rabinowitz when the family got kicked out and wound up in Poland.”

      I suppose Leo thought that Russia sounded better than Poland and that Rabinovich sounded more regal than Rabinowitz.  But, of course, the name simply meant "son of the rabbi.”  Everybody and his brother was a rabbi back in old Russia and they all had sons.

No matter.  Leo, who was almost ninety at this point, was not about to switch peeves.

      “Count Rabinovitch,” he announced just as the kettle began to whistle.

      That sounded wrong to me…like King Joey.  Later on I did some research and found that the equivalent in old Russia was called a graf…like a Burggraf with a chilly castle, or a Vizegraf with a temporary title, or maybe even a Landgraf with acres of orchards.  After the Partitions of Poland in the 18^th century, the word for someone with some royalty in their line shifted to the German-derived title hrabia.  But neither of those rang true either.  Count worked best even if it turned out to be completely fictional.

      “Did our family own land?” I asked Leo, but I knew the answer already. 

      “No.  We come from peasant stock.  The land owned us.”

      He was standing by the window pouring tea and from that angle he did look a bit like my father.  Not as handsome of course, not as appealing.  Yet I could see something familiar, like a visual echo, in his profile and the cut of his ear.  It was that kind of hint at a man I barely knew, I realized then, that also brought me out there that afternoon.

      “So what made him a Count?”

      “He had to account.  He was an accountant after all!”

      That did ring true…as the kind of cornball joke my father would also have made.  Leo looked at me for a moment to make sure I got it and in that glance I saw my Pop waiting for me to snicker.

      “Heh,” I concluded, knowing that he would keep repeating it until I did.

      “So what do you want?” Leo asked, sitting down with the tea tray. 

      Some sense of the past, of my history, of how the world – combustible and cringing but with an odd will to go on – led from precosmic goop up through the jolly molecules and then to spunky sponges and on to the dinosaurs with their lust for life and the first humans scrambling for warmth, all the way up and up to me sitting there wondering how to answer that question, I thought.  But Leo could not wait that long for an answer.

      “Sugar or Splenda?”

      “Oh.  Sugar,” I said and took two packets of Splenda.  “What was his actual name?”

      And here he raised himself up and boldly faced the harsh winter light, which was tough because it was July and the apartment was stifling.

      “Count Leonid Ostropova Rabinovich!” he pronounced.

      “Count Leo?” I said.  “That’s quite a coincidence.”

      “I was named for him.”

      “You don’t happen to have a picture of him by any chance?  I’m collecting.”

      “No.  But I have something much better!”

      Leo disappeared into the bedroom long enough for me to archive his entire apartment: the large couch with the worn fabric on the arm, my teacup with a floral design and a chip at the rim, the Rembrandt self-portrait cut from some book but mounted neatly in a frame from Ikea, the dust on the desk, the streaky window on the other side of which the ocean seemed fast asleep in the sun.

      Leo came back and handed me a small piece of paper.

      “What is it?”

      “It’s a coat of arms.  The Crest of Count Leonid Ostropova Rabinovich!”

      “I didn’t know Jews even had them,” I said, inspecting it dubiously.

      “We barely had coats, let alone the arms to go with them.”

      “Heh.”

      “But this is real.  I almost lost it when I moved here.  That would have been a tragedy.  It’s a good thing the worst moment in life only happens once!”

      “This is just a copy from a book.”

      “Of course.  I think the actual one may be in some museum in Europe.  You should go there and find it.

      “So this is our family coat of arms?”

      “It was the Count’s coat of arms when he was given the title.  Awarded to him by the Tzar after he fought – with great courage I’m sure – against the Lithuanian Revolt of 1863.”

      “Why great courage?”
      “Why else Count him?  They could have just let him keep his sword.  No, I’m sure he won his title honorably. “

      “But you said we were kicked out of Russia.”

      “It turned out he was on the wrong side in the long run, but what can you do?”

      “And I can keep this?”

      “Keep it.  I have enough coats.  But if you find out anything more about him, you have to promise to tell me.  I might decide to write my own memoir some day.”

      Leaving kicked off the same ritual as arriving…more jokes about old Jews and sex, the same story about the woman who was dictating her memoirs to him because even at his age he still had a steady hand, then deluge, Ice Age, modern times…and finally the door.

      Studying the crest in the elevator, I was filled with doubt about what he said, about the Count, the war, and above all that coat of arms.  I was convinced that looking it up online, I would find multiple versions of it as some kind of well-known family crest from old Russia.  But I said nothing then, did nothing later, solved nothing in the end.

      There in that small apartment by the sea, with the paint peeling and the light fading and the dust settling, it seemed important to Leo that it be true and that I think so too.  That I could understand.  It is no small thing to have a Count to count on, some royalty in the very common blood we shared. 

      Outside, the ocean seemed to wake up and wave again.