From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  I search the pavement for clues. I taste the wind and listen, caress the concrete of this sidewalk; every sense strains to find her. I must not lose the trail now.

  I have followed her through the hilly byways of this city, she who will lead me to the American. I have followed dragging my suitcase as she passed through narrow alleys and dusty parks, she would have escaped me ducking through a building’s cool lobby but I would not be escaped. Between us I measured half a block so she might walk ahead and pretend not to notice me, for I understood she would not want to be seen with a Feldstein in public, even after all that has passed. Such courtesy I gave her freely. And she, she my friend come to my aid at last after all our struggles, she wove through these rising falling neighborhoods as if she did not know me. As if I have not spent my girlhood listening under her parents’ balcony to insults spoken plainly over tea, as if she did not recognize me from the nights we have spoken until dawn in my apartment, the vigils we have kept together. The times I have held her hand and she has wept without ceasing. Without a glance over her shoulder she danced me through this sun-shocked Jerusalem toward the American, to make amends for the wrong she did me.

  I forgive you, Lilka.

  Past playgrounds and shop-lined streets and close-built houses I hurried after her, until I reached this place, this broad roaring avenue.

  And now she is gone.

  I stand on the sidewalk, the weight of my suitcase burns my shoulder. Cars whip past or stand honking outside doorways, a thin-armed boy hugging a soccer ball dashes across the pavement. My ears ring with confusion.

  She has disappeared into this tall square building, windows piled high into dazzling brightness. Could this be where she means me to find the American?

  Squinting at hurtling cars, I consider the wind that sweeps behind them.

  O American watch over my path I will follow Your ways all the days of my life.

  I close my eyes and step into the street. When I open my eyes I am on the other side, behind me cars drag gales.

  The walkway to the building is short and lined with pale red flowers. I pull the metal door and step into darkness.

  And the trail awaits me. My eyes tear with gratitude. Lilka’s perfume leads me patiently through the foyer up echoing stairs, to this narrow entryway this glowing doorbell.

  “Yes?” Lilka’s voice sounds in Hebrew from behind the door, round and pretty like years of practice.

  I wait in silence and it is only a moment before she opens the door. She looks at me. Raises her eyebrows to inquire my purpose. As though she does not know already, as though she herself has not brought me to this place. Her wary eyes steal my breath, I had not remembered such endless blue. She stands before me, face round and flushed from our walk, a book in one hand. Her neck draped with a patterned scarf, yellow and green circling each other in spirals, yellow and green again and again and again.

  “Lilka?” I whisper

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “are you looking for someone?”

  “Lilka.”

  She shakes her head, her smile is honeyed. “My name is Fanya,” she says. “Fanya Gutman.”

  How her face has rounded and grown pink since camp, I would not recognize her if I did not know.

  “What is it you need?” she asks.

  Tones like jewels.

  She looks at my face, my hanging arms, my skirt. Displeased, she considers the suitcase which I have set beside my feet. “I’m not interested in buying anything,” she says.

  There is a long silence. I understand that she wants me to speak the words.

  “The American,” I say.

  “What American?” She looks puzzled. Then knowledge slips into her eyes. Among others she will pretend she does not know what I have come for, but now that we are alone Lilka will claim me her own.

  “You want Maya,” she tells me in Hebrew. She turns an empty palm to me. “Maya isn’t here. She’s gone away.”

  Lilka, your accent has grown unfamiliar through these long years. Lilka your Hebrew words are round as raindrops, but still if I strain I will hear traces of our Yiddish.

  She leans forward, suspicious at my silence. “You are the woman from Maya’s building, aren’t you?” She touches her fingertips gently together. Her delicate nostrils twitch. “I don’t know what you want,” she says. “But I saw you following me on my walk.”

  In the squared corner of her jaw, a pulse.

  “If there’s nothing else you need, perhaps you’d like to move along on your business.”

  “I need the American.” I speak to her in our Yiddish, soft syllables flooding the parched gate of my throat. “We need the American. Do you not remember we watched the skies for Her, now She has come at last. She is close by, together we will find.”

  She stares, I know she has understood me.

  “Maya isn’t here.” She lifts her chin, her Hebrew words shut a door on my Yiddish; she is chastising a simple child. “The American has gone away.”

  My throat is clotted with speech, I draw breath with difficulty. “I am not dull-witted,” I tell her.

  “I don’t know who you are or what you want,” she says in Hebrew. “But I have business of my own to conduct, so I’ll wish you a good day.” She reaches for the door handle.

  A door closing, my foot in its path.

  “If you had only asked Halina,” I say. “She would have told you I was not dull-witted. But it is too late.”

  Her blue eyes widen, she tries to push the door closed again but my foot, battered, blocks it.

  “What is it you want?” This time fear is scratched onto the surface of her words.

  I say nothing.

  She clutches the door with both hands and now she has shed politeness. Her face is washed plain with dislike. “You’re one of the ones from the concentration camps, aren’t you?”

  Lilka, I address her in my mind.

  “I can always tell.” She spits the words. “You wear the ugliness in your face.”

  Slow and quivering, I reach. She watches, then starts back as I am about to touch her cheek.

  Panic dances in her eyes. “Get away from me.”

  When the German guard shot you Lilka, did you feel the pain?

  “If you have anything to say to me, speak Hebrew. Speak Hebrew or German or Dutch or Polish.” Her forehead a deepening pink. “I don’t understand your Yiddish and I don’t want to understand.”

  “I forgive you,” I tell her in Yiddish.

  “You what?” The words escape her in Yiddish, one pearl-tipped hand flies to her lips.

  “Lilka,” I open my palms to her to show her I am her friend. “I forgive you. You did not know Karol, you could not know his Gentile ways.”

  “My name isn’t Lilka and I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her Hebrew pelts my ears. “What Gentile? And what Halina? I’ve never met you before.”

  She is not as I remember her, Lilka’s face shifts and dances before me. But I am determined: she will know me and bring me to the American. “I forgive you,” I soothe.

  But she is not soothed. Her lashes beat against her cheeks. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” she pleads.

  “Help me find the American,” I say. “All wrongs will be righted.”

  Her mouth works, she whispers. “Why won’t you leave me alone? I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “The American,” I say. It is important. She must listen. “The American,” I explain.

  “But she’s gone. She’s gone away.”

  How white her knuckles on the door handle.

  “The American is gone,” she repeats.

  From the street, cries of rushing traffic. Behind this woman is an apartment full of silence. Curtains hang straight in still air.

  “How old were you?” Her hands fly fierce with her speech. “When the war started.”

  The words escape me, puffs of wind. “I am fifteen.”

  Her voice is ragged with fury. “You know, I lived through the war t
oo. Perhaps you’re not aware of that. I was a young woman. I had a whole life there, in Amsterdam, nothing like your backwater Polish villages.”

  How the tendons stand out on her throat, I would reach out a hand to smooth them.

  “I don’t know what you people went through. In ghettos, in camps. And I don’t want to know. Do you hear me? I don’t want to know.” She steadies herself against the doorframe. Tucks a strand of hair. Straightens her scarf, and when she looks up a veil of boredom shrouds her eyes. “I don’t know why I’m even bothering talking to you at all, I should call the police.”

  “Lilka,” I call her quietly. “Be careful there is a guard beside the fence.”

  “Put it behind you. Don’t think. Just don’t think. Take a walk, get some fresh air. Sing a pretty song, not one of those horrid dirges. Why do you have to be that way ? People go on, don’t they? Why can’t you just shut it out?” How hard comes her breath, she stands rigid with her pride. “I never give anyone that power over my life. I never let anything or anyone touch me that way.”

  The apartment behind her is bright with sun and motionless, empty as an abandoned shell.

  “There is a guard he will shoot,” I say.

  She turns from me, her shoulders shuddering disgust; she wheels to address me again. “I lost my whole family. I left for my honeymoon, came to this noplace, and my family and my friends and my Amsterdam disappeared behind me. Do you have any idea what it was like to wait for the postman every day, looking for replies that never came? You think I don’t know what loss is too? My best girlfriend—” She stops more words before they can escape.

  “You’re wrong,” she informs. “I’ll tell you this, you’re wrong to hold on to it. What can it possibly accomplish? You’re nothing but a walking spectacle.”

  A bus rumbles on the street, girls shout a song.

  “Lilka,” I breathe my sorrow.

  Slowly she shakes her head. Slowly straightens her blouse, combs fingers through her hair. “Live for the moment,” she says.

  From somewhere in the building, a radio blatting music.

  She is not Lilka, this woman who pats fury from her soft face. I have been mistaken. Lilka has not come for me. She is not my friend, she will not help me find the American, she has taken my sister on a Sports Club outing, the two of them will whisper secrets and forget me.

  From the doorway a stranger regards me, she wants something I cannot recall what. Following her gaze I reach to my head.

  A knot, stubborn between my fingers. The breaking of dried-out threads as the kerchief loosens.

  She stares; her blue eyes narrow with her revulsion. “Did it grow back that way after camp?” she whispers at last. “Or did you do that to yourself?”

  I drop my headkerchief to the floor before her feet.

  “I forgive you,” I tell her.

  The stairs slap the bottoms of my shoes. In the darkness of the lobby I grope to the exit, from the stairwell behind me there is no sound.

  Outside, dry air caresses my arms, sun strikes my bare head. Children, a bus, automobiles. Such confusion assembled on one street. My heart is bitter in my throat. Where are You, my American? I search for You but do not find. Even my fast companions have abandoned me, even Lilka, Halina falls mute and Feliks does not goad.

  Here on this clamoring street, I hesitate. Sun presses curious in the tangle of my hair, strange silence echoes in my head. Now rises fear. I am alone. My feet point to the safe darkness of my apartment but I am stern with them, for there can be no returning. I have left that shuttered place behind I shall not return, until You have conquered past, and brought future.

  I seek You in the edges of the morning. In the shadows that rim this narrow path I search. In this alley, this valley, this concrete walkway that leads me up and up and up.

  14

  It is almost dusk when we reach the campground. Dov has driven slowly, and Rina has insisted on breaks with such frequency that I feel sure we’ve explored every possible exit off the highway; we even dropped in on elderly relatives of Rina’s in Yotvata, and sat sipping tea with her great-uncle while his wife shopped for a snack for us. Since midday we’ve ridden quietly, every question and answer accomplished with a minimum of words. Gil sits beside me and watches the desert pass. His hands lie open on his knees; the binoculars are balanced on his palms.

  Although the desert rolls without break or marking as far as I can see, I know from my guidebooks how near we are to the southernmost tip of the country. Fifteen minutes’ drive would bring us to Jordan, half an hour to Egypt. From that corner of the Sinai you can see the coast of Saudi Arabia, and a bad encounter with the currents of the Gulf of Aqaba could sweep a swimmer or rowboat north to King Hussein’s palace in minutes.

  The turnoff into the nature preserve is sudden—a quick fork to the right, with only a minimal sign marking the park’s border. We make our way between the final hills, Dov steering the Subaru along a faint, dusty track.

  A cooling wind comes through the open windows. In the fading light, goats cluster around caper bushes and olive trees. To one side rise sharp cliffs and caves, pillars of reddish rock. Salt bushes, their leaves a white-dusted green, dot a rocky hill ahead. Gently I rub the fine layer of salt left on my own cheek by the day’s heat.

  Dov turns between two lower hills and, the last of the setting sun glancing the windshield, we roll to a stop at a set of broad steps carved in the center of a flat valley. Dov shuts off the engine.

  The four of us climb out and stand beside the car, taking our bearings in the open space. The pink-streaked sky is dimming, the sun has eased its way behind the hills. Dov and Rina shake out their limbs. Gil and I survey the hills around us; we stand with our hands on the roof of the Subaru.

  The air here has an oddly familiar softness, a soothing quality I struggle to identify. Small birds streak past us. I move stiffly away from the car.

  Then I see the water. Just beyond the steps, the birds dart across the surface of a stone-rimmed pool that stretches along the valley’s pale floor. The water is clear and still, disturbed only by the birds’ knifelike paths. We’ve arrived at a manmade oasis: a narrow valley of mercy in this endless desert. My eyes, burning from the day’s relentless sun, rest on the water. My throat trembles; I’m grateful that I don’t need to speak.

  From across the valley, on the far side of the water, a glint of metal catches my attention. Two cars are parked at the base of a low hill, and figures are busy unloading bags from the trunks.

  “Hey, morons!” Dov shouts, and in an instant he’s down the stairs and on his way past the pool. Rina follows more slowly, rubbing her shoulders as she walks.

  Leaving my backpack beside the car for the moment, I start toward the pool, each stair requiring two of my own steps. Even Gil’s long strides can barely accommodate them. I imagine that we’ve stumbled into the front parlor of giants. We descend, carrying our small offerings of sleeping bags and dusty hats before us. Gil skirts the water and I follow. To one side of the pool is an open shelter: five or six beams of a roof laid across a free-standing frame. It’s an odd structure that could provide only the suggestion of shade against the midday heat, and I wonder whether someone started to build something else but became distracted.

  We set down our things at the edge of the shelter, and it’s not long before Dov’s friends join us. A stocky redheaded boy in glasses heaves a pile of half-empty water jugs to the ground, and two girls with linked arms enter the shelter, one of them carrying a beat-up guitar. Gear tumbles on the dirt, someone unloads firewood from the trunk of a car, introductions pass in a blur. There are a dozen or so of Dov’s friends, suntanned and loose with their insults; I catch only that the girl with the guitar is either Hana or Hava, and that Yair is the freckled one whose grin faltered only when he was shaking hands with Gil, as if he’d been reminded of something unpleasant. I watch Gil for a reaction, but he doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss.

  Dov and the others set up camp so bo
isterously I might assume they hadn’t seen each other in months. But I recall Rina telling me while we packed the car this morning that the group has camped here every few weeks since the beginning of high school. It was harder to coordinate while they were in the army, she explained; now that most of them have finished their service and are working or studying, it’s easier. Those still in the army figure out when they can get a few days’ leave, then the others arrange their schedules accordingly. Dov used to come here all the time, Rina said. It was his favorite spot. But he hasn’t been in a few years.

  As I watch the noisy gathering, I think, Dov used to come here with his friend who died. Is this his first time back since?

  A few flashlights have been pulled out of packs, and light swings busily across the rocky ground. Around us, the park is silent. The sounds from under this shelter seem to be the only ones in the valley. Dov and his friends shout and toss gear and bags of food; above us the beams appear to rise higher and higher as they fade against the darkening sky.

  “We need kindling for our fire.” Rina touches my shoulder. I hadn’t realized I’d drifted, but now I see I’m standing at the edge of the shelter, the pool a few yards behind me. “Come on,” Rina says. “Let’s go.”

  It’s a peace offering, and I accept it without a word. Beside a pile of backpacks we meet up with Dov, and the three of us set out.

  I can make out the shapes of the hills around us only vaguely. But Dov and Rina know where to go, and I follow them around the perimeter of the pool. Dov’s flashlight reflects in the eyes of two jackals pacing the far end of the water; he turns it off, and we move ahead as though there were no need for us to see. My feet scatter pebbles and slip along rocks, but there’s something surprisingly easy about walking blind in the evening breeze. We feel our way along the trail.

  Rina and Dov have chosen a path that rises into a fold between hills, and as soon as the first brambles brush my sandaled feet I understand why. Occasional low bushes promise fallen twigs; here and there Dov stoops to collect a stick from the underbrush.