I rang the doorbell to the suite, running my fingers through my cropped locks, waiting for Aunt Erma to answer the door. I heard the patter of her black flats draw nearer and then the metal noises of drawing off the latch and pulling out the deadbolt. The door swung wide open to reveal my beaming aunt. Shorter, maybe, than I had remembered, but vigorous.

“Hola, mija,” she greeted, with two kisses on my cheeks. (She had to stand on tiptoe.)

“Hola, Tia, ¿cómo ‘sta?” I replied.

All was well with her, except for the obvious. I had business in New Jersey that week, so Erma asked if I could make a stop by to help her with a little issue. “Poquito,” she told me.

“I’d be happy to. Is everything alright?”

“Yes, yes. Nothing too serious. It’s just that I’ve lost your Uncle in the books again.”

“You lost Uncle Saul?”
“Yes, dear. In the books.”

“In the books?”

“Well, he’d been busy with research lately, so he took a walk through the library and now I can’t find him again.”

I nearly dropped the phone. Again?

At that time I’d never actually been inside their apartment. I knew it was big and full of books. Books Saul wrote, read, bought, printed, borrowed, and found in boxes left on the curbs of New York. Books in Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, French, of course, English, Romansh, Switzerdeutch, and tribal dialects of West Africa. But I’d never really seen them all. Even with his grand-size suite on the Upper West Side, the floors, the windows, every piece of furniture was occupied by stacks and stacks of thick tomes. And right through the center of it all, passing through the living room and extending to the kitchen, was a massive maze of bookshelves—seven feet tall, layered three-books-deep on either side. This, I supposed, was the library Aunt Erma had mentioned on the phone. I could picture the short little man wandering away to disappear among the dusty books, his nose all the while stuck in another.

As soon as Aunt Erma opened the door, I launched into a round of Marco Polo: “Oy! Uncle Saul!” And with more frustration, more Yiddish: “Vus machs da? Es Laila, fershtay?”

“Oh, no,” She giggled and I felt as if I had done something stupid. “I tried that ages ago!” She cried. “He does not respond when he’s reading, Laila.” Well, that explained a lot. And also dreck.

Aunt Erma ushered me inside and sat me down in a plush armchair with a cup of tea and a thick slice of chocolate babka—reminiscent of Hagrid’s disastrous tea cakes and, so, went untouched. But I sipped my tea gratefully as Erma pulled a large portfolio of Saul’s handmade maps from a shelf on the outskirts of the “library” and threw them down on the coffee table.

“Here it is—” she had found the apartment map—at first glance, a conglomerate of mad scientist scribbles and half-legible cursive. (A common factor in all of Saul’s written work.) Though not altogether straightforward, it was color-coded (and I am a sucker for a good key).

Despite the colors, it took over an hour of the two of us scouring through the pages until we decided on a plan. And, in the end, it wasn’t really thanks to the map that we got going at all—Uncle Saul’s genetic lack of organization had proved his fatal flaw, infecting his cartographic talents somewhere around the north-east corner of his bookshelves (labeled the “Freud Corner” in messy red pen).

Instead, as we had finally made out the pocket of shelves dedicated to Slavic literature, I felt a gentle poking at my ankles. It was George. Erma and Saul’s Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoise. He was going to be named Grace after the species Latin name Testudo graca, which also just happened to be the name of his little sister, and arch-rival in the pettiest sibling feud in wealthy New York history. Saul was very pleased about naming a tortoise after his sister. He entertained himself ordering his new pet around the apartment; It was all “no Grace” this and “no Grace” that. And especially: “Bad Gracie!” But then the vet told them George was a boy and Saul was forced to surrender his revenge plot. He and George still hadn’t completely remedied their relationship since then.

But that was 10 years ago. And poor George, ignorant of such controversy which he had sparked, had just wandered over for a piece of stale babka and a pat on the shell. So I stroked him a bit, while Aunt Erma and I attacked the map. What seemed a matter of minutes later, I turned to find George licking his chops and my two-pound slice of babka reduced to one chocolaty crumb on the otherwise spotless white china saucer.

“Erma!” I jumped up from my seat. “George finished my babka!” I was quite alarmed. And slightly perplexed; that was the fastest I have ever seen a tortoise do, well, anything.

My aunt, however, stayed calm.

“Oh yes, dear, he loves his babka, Georgie.” She clicked her tongue at him affectionately. I raised an eyebrow. I know I’m no tortoise expert but I know a thing or two about Aunt Erma’s babka. “Just like your Uncle, really,” Erma continued, “Both pensive creatures. Both old,”—she chuckled—“and both love my babka!” I kept an eye on him anyway, just in case George decided he didn’t love it so much after all.

As it turned out, George really was a big fan of Erma’s babka—which maybe explained why most humans didn’t find it quite so edible, though maybe that was saying something about Uncle Saul—because next I found him licking page 34 of Swedish for Beginners which he had somehow pulled off the bottom shelf of a bookcase. Page 34 had a smear of babka glaze at the bottom corner.

I was impressed. As far as I knew, tortoises were not known for their acute sense of smell. It seemed that George had some kind of babka-sixth-sense. The sweet side of the Force, if you will. He ricocheted (or the tortoise equivalent) around the apartment from babka spot to babka spot, and if he couldn’t find one, he just plopped down in the middle of the floor and closed his eyes. It was nearing an addiction.

Massaging my temples, I turned away from the tortoise and helped Aunt Erma clear the dishes. From the kitchen I stared hard at the hulking walls of books; somewhere within which Saul was holed up, oblivious to the outside world.

For a brief moment, I imagined Aunt Erma’s life. Living in such—however educational—filth, with no way of knowing when or for how long her husband might be lost in their own apartment. Some wives put up with their husbands’ drunk escapades through Vegas. Saul’s Vegas was his books. And here was Aunt Erma. Waiting patiently. Baking babka. She had asked me here, sure. But there was no rush. We had time for tea. I could come again tomorrow if I was busy. And I might come back the next time when he got lost again.

I looked over at the five empty babka tins sitting in the drying wrack. “Are those all for George?” I asked her.

“Oh no, some for the neighbors, me, of course, and Saul took a loaf himself as a study snack.” She sounded like his mother, sending him off to elementary school with a packed lunch.

Meanwhile, I noticed George was on the move again. His little claws clacked away across the wood floor. Then, I had an idea.

“Saul took a whole loaf?”

Aunt Erma nodded. “Yes. You know, to tide him over for however long.”

“Right.” However long. “Do you have some twine?”

Then, in a Marvel-style movie montage, Aunt Erma and I enacted my plan. With over-dramatic flair, I double-knotted the end of the spool of twine to the front door handle and yanked it to check its holding power. We turned to follow George who had wandered off into the books and I let the spool unravel behind us.

“To the babka!” I told George.

From there the drama tapered off fairly quickly. Now we realized our search party was being led by a very literal tortoise. And who knows whether there’d be an Uncle Saul at the other end of those crumbs.

We found the babka first. Then, as George skittered off towards a monumental crumb under a pile of papers, Aunt Erma and I looked up to find my uncle perched atop a stack of books like Yertle the Turtle. But what he was actually reading was much more out of the norm. Instead of the dusty, title-less cover (the smudgy letters printed instead on the spine), Uncle Saul’s hands gripped the glossy cover of a People magazine.

I gasped. Next to me, Aunt Erma wheezed in exasperation. She marched up to her husband and snatched the literature out of his hands.

“What is this?” She cried.

With no pages in front of him, Saul came to as if she had pressed his power button.

“Oh hi Laila,” he said to me, adjusting his glasses. “Did you know Megan and Harry are tying the knot?”

Aunt Erma and I stared at him with gaping mouths. The sound of George munching away in the corner amplified the deafening silence. I peered over Erma’s shoulder at the magazine article: Get Ready For The Royal Wedding! This was it. His mid-life crisis.

Just as I began to see flashes of the horrifying new future—Was that Uncle Saul in a Ferrari?—Aunt Erma fainted into my right shoulder. I floundered clumsily, attempting to prop her up against me, and crashed to the floor. I looked up at my uncle, who had again picked up the magazine, and I thought I had never seen him look so… British.