From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  “Sure,” I tell my cousin. “Thanks.”

  It is late afternoon when we leave Sacher Park, and I walk along roads filled with soldiers my age toting bags of laundry, hitching rides from the bus stop for the last leg of their journey home for the weekend. As I pass them, I wonder whether any of the more exhausted-looking ones are Dov’s charges. I spend several blocks pitying the soldiers unfortunate enough to be under his surly command.

  When I turn the corner onto my street I see an old woman moving slowly along the sidewalk. It is the woman from the apartment below mine. I’ve never before had more than a glimpse of her, and now I quicken my steps and approach her with mounting curiosity.

  She wears a faded brown cotton skirt and a beige sweater, and her head is wrapped in a dark kerchief so that she looks like one of the ultra-Orthodox women. But there’s something different about her—perhaps the way she carries herself, walking intently, her eyes on the path directly ahead of her, as if each step brings her closer to some thirsted-after relief. She is so slight it appears a puff of air could send her stumbling.

  A yeshiva student tags along beside her, gesturing emphatically. Under one arm he holds a yellow sign.

  The woman stops walking. For a moment she examines the boy. Then she shakes her head. As I near them, I hear her speak in an accented Hebrew. “I don’t need a sign,” she is saying.

  “For your home,” the boy says. He is respectful but insistent; she must hang this sign from her balcony.

  “I don’t need,” she tells him.

  I am almost even with them now, on the opposite side of the street. I trail my fingers along a low stone wall, pretending to be lost in thought.

  The yeshiva student has begun speaking again, but the woman is not listening. She has seen me and now she stares.

  She has a flat face, sallow cheeks, plaintive impoverished features. But it’s her eyes that nearly stop me: watery and intense, a pale blue that cuts through everything. Her expression is suffused in wonder, as if she has just received an unexpected blessing. She turns her back on the boy beside her and, keeping her gaze on me as I walk, performs a strange and elaborate nod, almost a bow. Then she reaches out a hand, palm up, as in supplication or praise. Still facing me, she speaks to the black-hatted student behind her. “I don’t need your sign. I have already.”

  My steps have faltered. I want to stand and speak to this woman, but I don’t know what to say.

  “You have a sign already?” The student circles her in an attempt to regain her attention.

  She says nothing, only watches me as I idle past. I crane my neck over my shoulder to watch her as well. Our gazes are locked. For a second I feel dizzy. Instinctively, as though I were navigating the edge of a chasm rather than an ordinary stretch of pavement, I check my balance against the stone wall.

  I wrench my eyes away.

  “So why didn’t you just tell me you had a sign already,” the yeshiva student is saying. “Just be certain to hang it where people can see it.”

  I turn down the path toward my building, and I can hear the woman’s soft footsteps behind me. When I slow, she slows; when I stop, she pauses, diffident.

  “Let me know if you need help hanging it,” the student calls out behind us. “Soon every home will have one, God willing.” I don’t turn back, and I can tell without looking that she doesn’t, either.

  At the bottom of the stairwell I face her.

  She steps sideways off the path. Half hidden in bushes, she waits.

  “I’m your neighbor,” I say. “Maya.”

  She says nothing.

  “I live upstairs.”

  She is shy now, like a schoolgirl, a hand raised uncertainly to her mouth. She steps back farther into the bushes.

  She is waiting for me to go.

  “Come visit anytime.” My words sound idiotic and I see her flinch. I start up the stairs. Twice I hesitate, and twice footsteps stop abruptly behind me. When I have passed the second-floor landing I hear the sound of a key in a lock behind me, then a soft click.

  The American: her presence ignites memory. I wander in a haze of days, years flit like shadows.

  There will be a war, the man behind the post office counter repeats as he counts out my pension. Do you understand, a war.

  Yes, I tell this man. I know what is war.

  Listen to me, old woman, the man insists. His voice follows me to the door, his voice pleads as I stand in the doorway facing the street. I’m not talking about whatever part of Europe you hail from, I’m talking about Israel. A war in this city, an invisible war, coming from the sky. There is a dictator, and missiles, a war coming to your building. A war in your bedroom, do you understand, please you must get a gas mask. Tape to seal a room, baking soda in case of chemicals. Don’t you have anyone to stay with, a grandmother shouldn’t spend a war alone.

  Live a war, alone, they are coming from the sky. Do not be frightened. This door sealed there will be gas.

  Saddam Hussein, do you understand? the man calls to me. The Persian Gulf. I turn to see him. There are veins bulging on his neck, they are purple and I wonder has anyone told him this. No, the man pauses, red in his face. No one has. A woman laughing behind me. The man shakes his head, slowly. Someone make sure this lady gets a gas mask, he says, and I turn back to the street.

  That week, a city full of masks, people disguised with war. They carry it in cases on the street, at the sound of sirens they will strap war to the faces of their children. Women walk by with rolls of tape, they are preparing a chamber for their families.

  One of the blacks stops me on the street, talks excitedly leaning close. Do you hear? The Rebbe has declared it, we won’t need masks after all. The Messiah is coming, the next world is approaching. Don’t let these city officials frighten you. We lift our eyes to the hills whence cometh our—

  In this city sealing its windows, the blacks fling open sashes, they brim with assuredness.

  But in the evening as the street grows dark, I see a kerchiefed woman crouched on her balcony with radio to her ear; across the street children open their windows and peer up curious. Night settles. In my Jerusalem bed I lie and dream of Warsaw rain. I dream wet cobblestone and bubbling gutters, suddenly I wake rooted with sound. At first it seems a shofar, we are gathered here to repent our sins, the cantor’s assistant in the Great Synagogue is calling us all to Yom Kippur judgment. Even Mother bows her head before the rabbi, For our sins are grievous, she chants. O Lord how we stand before you humble. How our wickednesses have multiplied our wrongdoings grown bold.

  Still the sound blasts on, even the young cantor with his puffed straining cheeks cannot charge us with our transgressions for so long.

  I step out of bed, go to the window. Across the street the blacks stumble onto their balconies to look as well, then duck inside to their psalms and do not appear again. Another siren joins the first, together they wail to the city gathered below. In an apartment nearby, a woman screaming then sobbing. Let me put a mask on the baby. Let me do it just tonight, God will understand. Her words are smothered in sound, the sirens layer one upon the other, the cry of Jerusalem seeding itself in airless chambers.

  On the street, nothing moves.

  O Lord how we stand before You.

  Barefoot I run to the balcony, I fling open the shutters. They are heavy and the motion wrenches my shoulders, there is horrible pain but I do not stop. I push open the windows, rush breathless to the door and down this stairwell. Outside I stand in nightdress without jacket or hat. The streets are deafening, they are empty of people, they are empty of cars, this night trembles with sound.

  Shadows quiver and rear across alleys, bits of fire drop slowly through sky. The city is struck dumb. And still the sound, deafening. The sound that might make a girl hold her head and weep. My heart eases in its pounding, I walk now slowly Down the path I pass. Through the park, these soothing streets. There is no one, no one, and I nod my understanding. Tonight the city is my home. A ragged white light
shoots across the sky. It sails triumphant and I raise my arms to it, I embrace the sky as it fills and drains of light. I lift my eyes to the heavens whence cometh my voice, with my eyes I follow the path this falling star has seared across the night and I sing back to the sirens, I sing loud and rhythmic and fierce and my song charges the heavens to atonement.

  Hours after my return from the Shachars’ picnic, my stomach is knotted with hunger. Gil and I have planned to cook an early dinner, but he is out somewhere on an errand. To pass the time, I read yesterday’s paper. When I can no longer concentrate, I hit on the idea of hanging a plant in the living room.

  I remember that Gil keeps some nails on the top shelf of his closet, so I drag a chair from the kitchen and swing his closet door wide. As I grope above my head along the dusty shelf, my hand closes on a hard leather pouch.

  I step down from the chair, and sit on the bed. In my hands are the binoculars that belonged to Gil’s father. With great care I remove them from the pouch.

  They are worn, the black plastic deeply scratched. There is a dry smell of long disuse. I examine the small round eyepieces, the smooth dark lenses. Then I slip the cracked leather strap over my head. I sit holding my neck straight against the drag of the binoculars. Resting against my breastbone, they seem unnaturally heavy, and dangerous—unapologetic reminders of war. Witness, I recall, to the making of a widow. I picture a soldier Gil’s age, looking out on a threatening world through these glasses. On his face the hard plastic cylinders are a mask of battle: formidable protectors, shielding his wondering eyes. The soldier rises, peers through his glasses at the horizon. He sees a world of swirling dust, enemy tanks.

  When Gil enters the apartment, I don’t try to hide the binoculars. I look at him, then at my knees, knobby and naked.

  Gil stands in the bedroom without speaking. Then he lifts the binoculars from around my neck and sits beside me. He turns them over once in his thick-jointed hands, then cradles them to his stomach. After a while, I notice that he’s crying.

  With a hoarse laugh, he wipes his cheek on one shoulder. He looks at the stain on his T-shirt. “Well, my mother always said I was a very sensitive boy.”

  He drums his fingers on the binoculars. Then, without warning, he is all bright-eyed sarcasm. “‘Gil always saw things other boys didn’t see,’” he simpers. “‘Things hurt him. He used to come to me and say, Why? And I would have no answer. Sweet boy.’” The words are a curse in Gil’s mouth. “‘He and I were so close, then.’”

  “Maya,” Gil addresses me urgently in his normal voice. “Someday when we have children, that woman is not to come near them.”

  I start at the ease with which he says it: When we have children. Not knowing how to react, I keep my face blank. Can you say that again, I want to ask.

  “My father,” he says, “always thought that she was waiting for the opportunity to betray him.”

  I tell myself to focus on what he’s saying. My face is flushed from excitement, and nervousness. “You think your mother was unfaithful to him?”

  “Who knows what that woman did or didn’t do?” Gil fingers one worn eyepiece, then the other. “But you know what I do remember? It was about five years after he died, I was eight years old. And it was the evening of Memorial Day, the scouts were putting on their ceremony to commemorate the people from the neighborhood who’d been killed. All the kids were participating, they were going to read the names of the fallen soldiers who’d grown up in their scout troop. We had to get there early to sit on the benches reserved for bereaved families. Tsipi, our neighbor, was going to drive us. But when she arrived, my mother didn’t come downstairs. Tsipi led me up to her room, calling out all the while for my mother. When she didn’t answer we went into her room. There she was, sitting on the edge of the bed that she and my father had shared. She was dressed in the same dark dress she always wore to the ceremony, makeup and hair in place. But she was just staring into the dresser mirror and didn’t turn around when we came in.”

  Gil lays the binoculars on the bed and looks at them. After a pause he continues quietly. “‘Aren’t you coming?’ Tsipi asked her. And my mother said, ‘Did you know, Tsipi, his dying was the best thing that ever happened to me?’”

  Gil looks exhausted. He reaches for my face, and he speaks to me as if I am the dearest thing in his life. “Tsipi rushed me out of the room. She took me down to the kitchen and she told me, ‘Your mother meant nothing of what she said. Do you understand? Nothing. Your mother is just feeling sick today, so she says crazy things that aren’t true. I’m going upstairs now to talk to your mother until she feels better.’ Then Tsipi, Tsipi who waddled like a hippopotamus when she walked—my father used to call her Tsipi the house-on-legs—turned to go back upstairs. But my mother was already on her way down, one hand on the railing, cool and composed. She walked to the bottom of the stairs, she said to Tsipi, ‘Let’s go.’ Then she took my hand and led me to the car. And we drove to the ceremony and walked through the crowd, everyone was so respectful, and we ducked under the string and went to sit on the front bench. And I watched her play widow for everyone who cared to look.”

  His eyes fix on the window beyond me, reaching for daylight. He chuckles.

  “Wouldn’t you guess it, when the results came back from the psycho-technics, the teachers said, Look what a bright young man, he panicked on the exam and now he’ll have to put up with a terrible army placement, they’ll put him in the green army when he ought to be in the gray.

  “Idiots. I threw the exam because I didn’t care to jump through hoops for the army that answered my mother’s prayers. Do you think I cared what they thought of me? So place me with the dregs, I’ll spend my three years laughing at you all.”

  Gil sits in silence, his face shuttered with thought. Then he rises, slips the binoculars into their pouch, and returns them to their place.

  He kneels on the floor so that he is not above me or below me, but looks directly into my eyes as he makes his confession. “I know I’m difficult. Sometimes things feel very”—he hesitates—“not in control.” He shakes his head gravely. “It will get better, I promise.”

  The next afternoon I take the last of the laundry from the sink and carry it dripping through the living room, careful to dodge between drawings as I pass. Gil has gone to the gallery. The air is unusually still, even the sketches hang motionless. On the balcony the sun burns my bare arms as I pin T-shirts and jeans to the line.

  Under the glare, I am too tired for pretense. Today, I freely admit, will hold no adventures. I will not explore new neighborhoods, I will not spend the afternoon touring educational museum exhibits or quaint ethnic neighborhoods. I will write a letter full of lies, and steal phrases from travel brochures to prove them.

  Since yesterday I have been thinking about the woman downstairs. I don’t know why, but the more I recall her standing rapt and speechless on the street, the more convinced I am that there was something she wanted to say.

  The street is quiet. There is no one in sight.

  Last in the laundry pile are two rags that Gil uses for cleaning charcoal dust from his work area: stained and misshapen things. I pin one to the line, and weigh the other in my hand.

  When the rag slips through my fingers I lean over the balcony rail to watch its path. Straight down it falls in this breezeless air, then catches with a soft huff on the empty clothesline of the woman downstairs, and bobs there satisfyingly.

  I slide my sandals onto my feet. I step through the living room, past rows of mute disapproving faces; I leave the apartment and go down the stairs to knock on her door.

  10

  The American’s tears are diamonds, her laughter is gold and spills over and fills this apartment with light. She and her boyfriend tease in rising scales, love-sounds climb like questions until giggles burst to gales stealing their breath, and mine as well.

  The sun is coming through the cracks in the shutters, stretching fingers into my room, a person must huddle to the cor
ner to escape. Today is quiet, no motors churn the blacks’ sabbath air. Outside, stone and sky. Cardboard signs fading in the sun.

  On a day like today, the river running slow. And Father strolling in gray hat and coat, his black knobbed walking stick sinking in grass. Mother and Halina and I behind, on the shaded slope of the bank. We step through softness, now breeze dips sunlight in arcs to the ground. The river reflects flashes of sky, even through these closed eyelids such an afternoon steeps color into the mind, tea leaves curling fronds of red or brown in a steaming clay pot.

  Breeze, like silk between the fingers.

  I would tell Mother, The river is a patient mare pulling a cart toward sunset. I would ask her, Shall we go lay our hands on its skin and press until we are admitted, the riverwitch will nod at ripples but will not wake.

  But Mother would scold, Dream too much listen too little, Shifra. Fool for fancy. It’s good you’re a girl, no boy like you could last an hour The world tells bitter time to nitwits. When the day comes you’ll have to marry before the family finds out you’re simple. Come inside, sew with your sister Halina this afternoon, don’t trouble her with your fairy tales.

  Shifra, haunting daughter. Mother speaks low as she pours out dark tea in the parlor. Sometimes my own child’s eyes frighten me when I’ve finished waiting on a customer in the shop and I turn to find she’s watching me. Who can blame you, Hannah, Aunt Riva consoles. I’d be uneasytoo. Such eyes the girl has. At least you have Halina. Halina will bring mazel. Once she gets over her school-craziness. All those boys after her and she doesn’t even care. Won’t look upfront her books. Already near the end of gimnazjum, what will you do with her?

  But Mother and Father don’t know Halina’s secret. Only I.

  Halina brings a basket of long green peapods to the door, we crouch to shell them. She pulls a paper from under the basket, unfolds it into my hands and I am ready. “Test me.” She is proud, she wipes golden hair from her forehead. “Quick, before Mother comes. See if I haven’t memorized them all.” It isn’t sabbath that she fears, for Mother knows we break sabbath, she breaks as well and Father too, he carries on business from the back window of the shop and neighbors come and go in whispers as if quiet will keep them from being recognized. Mother sneers at the religious and makes Halina shut the electric lights only once each month for Grandmother’s sabbath visits from Bialystok.