“His best friend, Rafi. Dehydrated in a hamsin. A training accident, Dov hasn’t been the same since, and this time of year is the worst. Now he’s making his decision about whether to stay in the army for his career. Of course he wants to do only the most dangerous assignments. He’s worked up and arguing with everybody, no one can talk to him.”
Somewhere, I knew, there existed another version of myself: a person who understood how to react to pain. Recalling how Fanya had blushed at the gentle flow of Mozart duets, I wondered whether she might, after all, help me find a way back to that other person. Silently I called to her for assistance.
Out loud I said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” Fanya’s voice cut the night air. She waved a hand. “What’s sorry? There’s no sorry. There’s only life before, and life after. Dov should know not to drag the living down with the dead. He’s got to leave it behind.”
“But his friend died. I’m sure he—”
“Rafi was a sweet boy,” Fanya sighed. In the dark I could distinguish the outlines of her features, and her beautifully composed face offered no refuge. Without warning, Tami’s hopeless tones echoed in my mind: a register of protests unspoken and emotions deadened. I imagined Tami as a child, frantic over some schoolyard slight, her mother’s elegantly shawled shoulder turned in indifference. Now, under cover of dark, my tears flowed freely. I told myself they were for Tami.
Fanya checked the sleeves of her jacket, straightened each with a tug. “That’s why Dov perhaps hasn’t acted as nicely as he should. So now you understand not to take it personally.” She spoke pleasantly, but the iron will behind her pretty words could not be mistaken. Nor could the charitable lie. “Dov thinks very highly of you, he told me so.”
For a long time I walk the quiet streets. I wander in loops through the residential neighborhoods, turn corner after corner. When I make my way home, the night is blank with clouds. The buildings are emptied of light, their cooling stone walls yield no comfort.
The apartment is dark. I flip on the lights, first in the entryway, then in the living room. The clock on the wall reads two a.m. A stained feather quill lies below the empty drawing table, and several ink bottles have rolled into a corner. Propped against the stool are three cardboard tubes, which, I assume, hold Gil’s new work. I look at them, but I don’t go any nearer. The old paper sketches observe me from the clotheslines.
Holding my breath, I listen for movement. I hear nothing. I leave the living room and approach the open door of the unlit bedroom. When my eyes have adjusted I see that Gil is lying in the bed, watching me. He is swaddled in covers; only his head is visible. I stand with my hands resting lightly on either side of the door frame.
“I thought you weren’t going to come home,” he says at last.
I’ve never heard his voice so small.
I don’t move. An unfamiliar thought sings in my head: Run.
“Maya?” he calls.
I step forward, for no reason other than that I am called.
“Maya,” he mumbles.
I kneel beside the bed. I touch his lips, the damp streaks on his cheeks. Gently I cradle his neck and stroke his forehead, the soft roots of his hair. His hand reaches for mine and grips, so hard it stuns me. He waits.
“Don’t ever think that,” I tell him.
His hold on my hand is painful but the smell of him is sweet, he is a boy purified by soap and fear.
“Will you always come?” he asks.
His need exhausts me; to stand against it requires more energy than I can muster. So I open my mouth and speak. “I’ll always come.” Once I’ve begun, the words multiply with astonishing ease. “I tried to get home early, but Fanya wanted me to meet so many people I couldn’t even get to a telephone. I was thinking of you the whole time.”
Kneeling on the tile, I feel my heart pound with a new secret—I am lying to him.
And he believes me. Motionless beneath the sheet, he awaits reassurance. How weak he seems. How trusting and in need of protection. And clear as daylight, I see the flaw in myself, the knot of feelings his hands cannot penetrate—I don’t need him as much as he needs me. I don’t love him as much as he loves me.
Compassion rises wildly inside me at last so that I can barely speak; the pity I could not feel earlier for Dov now pours out, a desperate stream of fear for Gil. His vulnerability is everywhere I look, everywhere I touch. I caress his eyelids, his arms. The understanding that I could betray him fills me with panic, even as I experience an unexpected surge of power.
“Why do you believe in me?” he whispers, but I drown these words in affection. “You’re moody,” he says. “I don’t understand you. You’re so good to me and then you hurt me.”
“Come, sleep,” I say.
“I’ll try,” he tells me.
In the morning, I knew even before I look that there will be a bundle on my doorstep from the woman downstairs. I gather the loosely wrapped package into my arms and deposit it casually on a shelf. When Gil is gone I will pore over my neighbor’s offering for hours—its faint smell of age, its black leatherette cover, its tiny print. I know that she has not read this book of psalms often, for although it is old the binding still crackles. Still, she has presented this gift for my eyes, and she means me to understand her message. I open the yellowed pages at random and read aloud. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, see my affliction at the hands of my foes, You who lift me from the gates of death.” The words draw me in, lead me tantalizingly along a narrow trail of expectation, and tell me nothing. “So that in the gates of fair Zion I might tell all Your praise, I might exult in Your deliverance.” This time the wrapping is a newspaper from the 1950s, a story about a kibbutz in the north closing off its roads for fear of a repeat of the previous week’s attack, which left so many dead and so many wounded.
The woman downstairs is crazy. People who aren’t crazy don’t give presents to strangers.
I write easily to my mother, sentences flow from my pen. These are the things I have done, these are the places I have gone. I fold the sheaf of pages into the envelope, I don’t let myself pause. I have become a liar and not even seen it happening. My words comfort Gil, they fly to America and keep my mother well.
I set the addressed envelope on the kitchen table. I search for stamps—in the bedroom, in the living room, in my pockets. I have none. I sit at the table. My hands, unoccupied, trace the edges of the envelope. They look foreign: short stubby fingers, guilty of deceit. They are trembling; I’m horrified by the shaking that passes from my hands through the letter. I seize it and I rip and rip until this envelope of lies is scattered on the table before me.
From amid the scraps I take the small black book. Once more I open it, and with uneven breath I read.
O Lord, turn and rescue me. Deliver me as befits Your faithfulness.
Crazy. Completely crazy.
I adore you O Lord, my strength, O Lord, my crag, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, my rock in whom I seek refuge, my shield, my mighty champion, my haven.
It’s clear there’s something she wants from me.
As I read I walk to the living room, where I sit on the sofa. I close the book and finger its binding. When I lift my eyes to the room around me, Gil’s sketches assail my vision.
Why would anyone believe I had something to give?
At last I see how fully my own lies have trapped me. I’ve worked hard to win the warmth in my mother’s letters—I’ve even enjoyed shaping my own story for her benefit, feeling in control. But instead of closeness, I’ve won isolation. Every hard-earned scrap of her respect raises the stakes. I can’t disappoint her now, I tell myself as I begin each new letter. I can’t, after all I’ve written to her, admit my own confusion.
Time after time I’ve searched my mother’s replies for help. I’ve imagined I might find some piece of cryptic advice; tucked into the turn of a phrase will be some instruction for how to understand this country, how to assure Gil’s gentleness, how to endure. But
my mother’s letters contain no instruction, only testimony to her own endurance. And pride in me.
Tami can’t help me. And I can’t trust Fanya to understand. As for Orit and Michal, even if I knew how to contact them over summer vacation, their impatience would burst out before I’d spoken half a sentence. I started, once, to write a letter to Ina at her parents’ address outside Purchase. But the words looked wrong on the page. No matter how I tried to tell the truth, I couldn’t find a way to explain things properly. She wouldn’t care how beautiful the sunsets are here, how the buildings catch the light and the people move more gracefully on the street because of it. How people look you in the eye when they pass, share their food at the bus stop, how the women hand their babies to strangers while they fumble in their purses for change, and know without exchanging a word that whatever they might think of each other, there is trust. They touch when they argue, here in Jerusalem; they touch when they joke, and when they embrace they clasp so tightly I’m convinced they’ll never let go. I don’t think they notice how their admonishing, imploring, sailing hands shape the air and the city and—I swear it—even the pink and gold sky above them.
Ina was hurt by the way I neglected her, studying and working extra waitressing shifts in the months before my departure. “I think I’m jealous of Israel,” she told me once. I don’t expect her to see what appeals to me about this beautiful, difficult country. “Just come home,” she’d say. “Come back to where you belong.”
There’s no one I can talk to.
I sit on the sofa for a few more minutes. Distracted, I leaf through the book of psalms once more.
“Dov’s trip is next week,” I tell Gil at dinner that night.
“Dov who?”
“Dov Shachar, Dov my cousin. His camping trip to the south is next week.”
“Maya, I’ve got the opening in a few days, I’m not thinking about taking a vacation right now.”
“But you’ll be done by next week, won’t you? You’ll open Friday, then the exhibit is up and you’re free to travel.”
Gil rubs his eyes hard and looks at the slowly heating coffeepot. “I will want to be away when those idiot critics come out with their opinions.”
“Then why don’t we go?”
His voice is packed with resentment. “I don’t give a shit about camping or about your macho paratrooper cousin.”
I ladle soup into a bowl and pass it to him.
“You know, not everyone in the army is a hero,” Gil continues.
I wait.
“I mean your cousin and his macho friends, they’re not all heroes just because they’re in the IDF.” Gil makes a gesture of annoyance, then draws the bowl to him. I see that he’ll relent; we’ll go to the desert with Dov.
And although I’ve never been enthusiastic about Dov’s halfhearted offer, I’m suddenly eager to go. Next week Gil will be, at last, freed of his project. The old sketches rustling in the living room, the tubes of new work I’m forbidden to see, will be gone.
As will the moods that have ruled our lives. Gil has told me over and over that the exhibit is all he can think about for now. It’s something he needs to do, there’s something in this work that’s important to him. When he’s through, he told me one night, he will be changed.
He will be gentle, I tell myself.
Imagining our trip now, I can hardly contain my excitement. Dov’s telephone call just before Gil reached home took me so by surprise that I even fancied I heard something warmer than indifference in my cousin’s terse instructions. “Seven o’clock sharp on Sunday, don’t forget your water bottles.” Of course I don’t really believe Dov wants us along. Thanks to Fanya’s machinations, he’ll despise me every kilometer of the way to the Arava and back. But the prospect of leaving this neighborhood—of actually taking one of the trips that I describe to my mother in my letters—seems to herald a new start. We’ll go to the desert; everything will be different.
Gil lifts the spoon, watches thin green liquid trickle down to the bowl. “What’s this?” he asks.
“Asparagus soup,” I tell him, and as he eats I take the newspaper from him and read.
I shan’t tell, Lilka repeats. You can’t make me. Halina steps toward her, menace radiates from her like electricity but Lilka stares flatly and does not back away Will you beat me, Lilka taunts, be a brute like the rest of your family? It won’t make a difference. I won’t tell you how I knew about Shifra and her filthy goy lover.
Vicious bitch, Halina breathes. You knew what would happen when you told our parents. But you went ahead and did it just out of spite.
It is the ghetto, we do not yet know that there is worse that can happen. Thinking we have come to the end of the world we are reckless. Even the husbandry of our strength falls in the face of our rashness. Halina, her features translucent with hunger, snatches at Lilka’s blond curls and misses narrowly; Lilka bleats but glares back. Halina is changed. Her University manners have left her now, she no longer dreams at night. Halina is a wild cat loose in these stinking alleys, she is not sorry for the scratch she has left on Lilka’s temple.
Lilka is laughing. With one hand she sweeps sky, rotting buildings, puddled pavement. What does it matter now? She is convulsed with laughter, she fights for breath. What does any of it matter?
Karol used to say I was a fountain filled with stories, more tales brimming every minute. Tell me, he asked, a story about a boy named Otto. “Once there was a poor boy,” I began. “He lived in a village in the mountains but in his heart he pledged to marry a particular girl from the valley.” Karol’s touch like warm rain on the small of my back. One day, I told him, I would begin to speak every tale I knew and I would not stop. No one understood yet, but I would be a teller of stories, a weaver of lives. How far I would travel, from country to country, no border could stop me.
Now it is only summer; there is no war yet, no ghetto. We stand together in the woods, Karol and I. Halina, home from Warsaw for the weekend, has arranged it. We are mushroom-picking in the forest. Father and Mother suspect nothing, only ask Why must you girls go always to the forest, why so far? It is my favorite place, Halina says. Father smiles. He is pleased now when Halina is home, the results of the examinations arrived in the post and now he tells everyone that his daughter has been honored in Warsaw. A Feldstein, honored in Warsaw. Father hangs the report on the wall of the shop.
In the woods Halina sings. Melody upon melody, one lullaby blends to the next. As long as we hear her we are safe from intruders, and the sound of her voice warns us of her nearness so that, searching through forest to gather enough mushrooms for two, she will not come upon us embracing.
Karol speaks, the thrum of his rib cage against mine. “I won’t let anything stand between us,” he says. The ground is wet beneath my thin shoes, his heavy boots. I have risen on my toes to kiss him and he sets me gently back on my heels, he will not permit me to strain to reach him but rather stoops to my upturned face. His hands rest on my shoulders. “Shifra, little one. I’ve been preparing everything, in the fall it will all be ready. The priest has agreed to marry us.” From the pocket of his shirt he pulls a letter. Stamped by the government, his army notice. We will marry the week before he must go, he will bring me to his family. They are ready to meet me, his mother has agreed at last and his father is preparing a house for us on the farm. And then it will be only a short time until his first leave.
When Halina calls out for me we walk hand in hand to meet her. Karol touches my cheek, stands back respectfully from Halina, with a soft thank you tips his hat. Halina nods, she looks away.
All summer we eat mushroom salad, mushroom sauce on potatoes, mushroom soup with dill. Pickled mushrooms fill jars lining kitchen shelves. Father says he will go mad from mushrooms but Halina smiles across the dinner table and asks Father does he mind so terribly, she loves wild mushrooms in the summertime. She will be very busy at University next year, but, she tells Father, there are many boys after her, boys from good families a
nd soon she will pick one, she will bring him to Father for approval. The woody smell of mushrooms thickens the air and Father beams from beneath his mustache. I always said she’d come around, he tells Mother. Even with all her University nonsense.
How did you know about Shifra and Karol? Halina repeats. Above us ghetto walls crash together, obliterating sky. Lilka shrugs. Why didn’t you talk to us first, Halina insists, instead of going to our parents?
Lilka turns to me now and I see that there is no fear left in her. The ghetto has blunted her prettiness, now she will scrap with us over bread but not over this quarrel from a world long past. Only this summer her boyfriend told her that he would leave her for Halina, yet here inside this barbed-wire city he has proposed marriage; they say Lilka accepted without a word. It will not be long before a shadow of starvation rings her eyes. Even I am willing to let her go, release her from this alley we have backed her into like a cornered animal. But Halina’s eyes blaze with fury. She has become a ragged thing, eyes bright with rage and dread. Did you know, Shifra, the anti-Semites chased us down the street this week? Even before the end of summer brought war, Halina’s reports from Warsaw were grown angry, one breezy weekend I heard for the first time fear in my sister’s voice. Did you know, Shifra, they beat my friend Shmulik with their heavy canes, and when the test scores came back they knocked my books down the stairs, ripped my paper and called me yid because I had—Halina’s breath uneven, the trembling begins and will not stop—because I had the highest score in the class.
Now in the ghetto Halina lifts her hand to slap and Lilka recoils. But Halina does not slap. She twists to one side, her cry is the end of hope and she walks slowly away down the alley. Lilka watches. She spits warily on the pavement.
After the war, when I found Feliks in Israel, he had to know everything about his sister. Feliks who had escaped the ghetto, who spent the war’s remainder in the barn of a Gentile family. Of camps he knew only rumors. Telling him about Lilka, I became mute. Stories choked inside me, I could barely begin and so I spoke in half-sentences. Fragments, I showed him: symbols of elements too fiery to touch. The smell of Lilka’s fear as train doors sealed shut, and such a terrible crush of bodies, one might not raise a head to ask a question.
From a Sealed Room Page 25