The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  Harlem

  August, 1997

  In summer the heat and the absence of routine made the days feel long and untethered; the hours seemed to unspool in a different way. Her weeks during semester were so structured and predictable, Marina realised, her hours neatly catalogued. There was never any time to be idle.

  She lay in bed watching the spill of sunlight on the floorboards. So much brightness early in the day. And yet in winter she complained about the insufficiency of the light, the shortness of the days. The blare of a car horn sounded outside the window, then two voices shouting. Their old apartment on Park Avenue had been immensely quiet, insulated from the noise of the street below. She far preferred the brownstone, which felt somehow properly located.

  Marina reached for the book on the nightstand. Rilke. She had not been able to sleep the night before and had slipped out of bed to find the volume she wanted from the study. Standing in front of the bookshelves she had heard footsteps and the low murmur of voices from the floor above. She had listened for the softer tones of a woman’s voice, wondering if Alma was upstairs with Ben. As far as she knew, the girl had not spent the night there before. Marina was still unsure if Alma and Ben were lovers. Ben was clearly enchanted but she had noticed a sweet shyness between the two of them, as if they had not yet given each other the permission needed for greater intimacy. And there was that gold cross around Alma’s neck.

  Dawn was already close, and the study felt hushed and penumbral, the street outside strangely quiet, the only sound the muted overlap of voices from above. Marina sat in Jacob’s armchair with her feet tucked up beneath her, the book open in her lap. She always reached for poetry when she was sleepless, as if words released from the bend of narrative might lull her back into restfulness. It was what she was always looking for in her own work, too: the compression and lilt of poetry.

  Marina Tsvetaeva had once said that an entire age could be forgiven just because Rilke had lived in it. How many times has she read the letters between Tsvetaeva and Rilke? That brief flare of correspondence, with its ravenous passion, its almost unseemly adoration. Tsvetaeva still writing after Rilke’s death. Her long elegy to him, composed in the cold hush of a French winter; impossible, it seemed to her, that the world no longer contained her beloved poet. Who would not want a love like that? Writing their letters between the wars, the two could not have known how swiftly the future would devour them. Rilke dying of leukaemia in Switzerland, Tsvetaeva hanging herself in Russia in the middle of the war.

  When she was a child it had made Marina uneasy to know that the poet she had been named for had died like this. By her own hand. There was something archaic about the ring of the words. Someone had said them about Dov when he died – she couldn’t remember who; it seemed so long ago. Certainly not her mother. Marina couldn’t help thinking of her brother’s hands when the news of his death came. His long fingers stretching out to catch hers as they skated in loops around the Lasker Rink the winter before he died. The shadow pattern of leaves in the park, the slippery crust of the path, the smell of wet wool.

  In all the photographs she possessed of her brother he looked like one of the pale-faced Hasidic boys who swarmed the Brooklyn streets around them. There was a thinness to his face and a fearsome hunger. Something fervent and unanswered. At times she wished Dov had left a letter for her. In those first days after his death she had been convinced he must have written something, that among his possessions she would find an envelope addressed to her. The lost letter took on a kind of mythic possibility. It might contain a startling insight, something unknown to her. It might tell her what she should do. Blank with sorrow, she imagined the letter tossed into the rubbish, left to mould in a dusty corner. But there was no need for Dov to write to her, she realised in the end. She knew all his grief. A letter setting it out would not have been a comfort but a kind of haunting. What could he possibly have said that she did not already know?

  She had felt the loss of him like a phantom limb, a wail rising up in her at night that she tried frantically to contain. The night after the funeral, she had slipped out of the apartment and walked to the Botanic Garden. At the Steinhardt Conservatory she looked in through the glass panes of the tropical pavilion. Through the cold glass she saw the rich green riot of ferns, the odd tropical plants and the purple orchids. She and Dov had loved the constant humid hush of the place, the complete eradication of the outside world. She must withstand this, she remembered thinking. That night she sat for a long time under the bare trees near the Japanese garden, Dov’s grey scarf wrapped around her throat. It had not felt impossible, then, that she might see her brother walking towards her over the red bridge. That they might turn and walk back towards home together.

  Dov was twenty-two years old when he died. He had been named David for the king. God’s chosen one. It had been voted on by all the kibbutz members. No one was named out of sentimentality, or to commemorate a lost relative. They were all given Israeli names; names that did not contain any shadow of a European past. Even Dov’s nickname had been given to him by a nursery worker, not by their mother. Strange, then, that her father had been so insistent on her own name. Such an inadequate and unreliable collection of stories existed about him. Sometimes Marina thought that Gizela had deliberately withheld information from them out of a kind of cruelty. She did not know why Yoav had loved the Russian poet, which poem had been his favourite. He never spoke of it, Gizela had always claimed, except to insist that their daughter be named for Tsvetaeva. It had caused an enormous fuss on the kibbutz, but Yoav was insistent about the name and in the end they allowed him to have his way. Marina had always suspected that the name was linked to some other, more private commemoration. His mother, or a sister. A lover, perhaps. Someone before Gizela.

  Once in a while Marina took out the photograph of her father, the one that the kibbutz museum had sent her. For a time she had kept it in a wooden frame on her desk, but it felt false to her. It made her think of a man she had known in California, someone she had not spoken to for a long time. He had no family heirlooms, no hallowed objects, so he trawled yard sales and second-hand shops collecting sets of silver cake forks, cut crystal vases, brass candlesticks. He attached an invented story to each object: a tablecloth that had been embroidered by a great-aunt, a wicker rocker that his grandmother had loved. The stories grew more and more detailed, the objects he collected more personal. A worn spectacle case, a hand-tatted lace collar, a walking cane with a carved handle. He dreamed up names of lost relatives to match the intricately monogrammed initials on old pieces of linen. This man had seen his inventions as a kind of rescue. He had saved all of these lost objects from oblivion, woven them back into history, and in doing so created a history for himself. It had made Marina feel deeply uncomfortable. It seemed to her like a plundering, not a restoration. She could not help thinking of the original, vanished owners, the true names of the long-dead women who had carefully stitched their initials on pillowcases and napkins.

  When she looked at the photograph of her father on her desk she had thought of the Californian man’s house, his desire to fashion a substantial past for himself. The black-and-white image of her father in its handsome walnut frame could have been plucked from an estate sale. He was completely unknown to her, someone she held no claim on. She possessed no memory of his face or the sound of his voice. She could not remember ever being carried in his arms. It was possible, Marina knew, that he had never held her.

  From the very beginning, Dov had hated the Children’s House. He wanted only to be with his parents. The story of his obstinate misery was told to Marina and him many times by Gizela. It was clear it had bewildered her – Dov’s tearful defiance, his stubborn clinging, the strange inwardness that she had seen very early in him. He had not known any other way, had been raised from the beginning away from his parents, with all the other children. But he only wanted his mother. Three weeks old, colicky and despairing, he cried all night, stiff and furious in the arms o
f the nurses. As soon as he could walk he began his night-time wanderings. Slipping silently from his bed in the dormitory and putting on his sandals in the darkness, he would make his way across the grounds of the kibbutz, past the newly built dining hall and laundry rooms to the building on the edge of the fields where the married couples lived. Dov knew which room belonged to his parents, and he would open the unlocked door and curl up on the floor beside their bed. Gizela told them that one night she had stepped out of bed and straight on to the small heap of her sleeping son. Each time Dov came, Yoav would have to gather him up and carry him back to the Children’s House. But the next night he would try again. Eventually she and Yoav were moved to another building on the far side of the kibbutz, too far for the little boy to walk.

  Couldn’t an exception have been made? Marina had asked her mother once. If it was so distressing for Dov, couldn’t permission have been granted for him to sleep with his parents? It was not the way of the kibbutz, Gizela told her. He could not stay with them. It was done for the sake of the children and the country. They were Sabras and they needed to be strong. None of this clinginess and fear. Even as a child, it had sounded like propaganda to Marina. A rehearsed socialist narrative. It was hard for her to imagine such a pragmatic coldness. But everyone on the kibbutz had come out of Europe. They had all been wrenched from the known world, where mothers tended their children and ordinary domestic intimacies were possible. Perhaps their ability to love their children in the old ways had been scoured out of them, along with everything else.

  Marina thought of Constance and Gabriel. She had seen them several times since the visit to the Public Assistance office. The girl was harsh on the child, quickly moved to impatience and anger with him. She would grip him roughly by the arm, slap him across the legs, flick his cheek in annoyance when he complained. At other times, she would ignore him with a stubborn persistence. It reminded her of Gizela, this ability to withdraw. Apart from Constance’s bursts of anger at him, there was not one hint that she had made room for her child inside herself, not a flicker of affection or concern. She looked away while a doctor drew blood from his arm, absently set him down on a chair or the floor when he tried to climb into her lap, pushed his hand away if he reached for the food on her plate. There was not even any tenderness in the way she tied him to her back – she would reach behind her to slap his bare leg if he wriggled.

  Marina knew nothing about Constance’s life before, but she had read about the squalor of those refugee camps, the fight for food, for water, for safety. Surely there must have been a fierce love, some primal protective instinct, to have kept a baby alive all those months there? To have brought him with her to America. But whatever fight had been in her then, whatever might have sharpened her devotion to the child in Rwanda, seemed to have sunk away, like the rest of her, into irretrievable depths.

  If Constance had retreated into a terrible blankness, the little boy seemed to have a surfeit of feeling. He would submerge himself in fits of the kind of pure rage and desolation she had witnessed that first day she had come across the two of them on the sidewalk. There was a misery in him that was profoundly distressing to Marina. Anger, too. One day, at the 96th Street subway station, it had taken both her and Constance to hold him down, to drag him flailing and screaming on to the train and hold him fast on the seat. Marina had watched Constance’s small hands clamped around the child’s ankles, her face impassive. When Gabriel finally quietened, his head buried in Marina’s lap, a gasp threaded through his sobs, Constance took her hands away, stood up and went to sit on the bench opposite them. She leaned her head back against the window and closed her eyes.

  Gabriel never laughed or spoke. Marina had not heard one word pass his lips, just as she rarely heard his mother speak to him, in her own language or in any other. Constance barely said anything at all, mumbling a response to a nurse or an official when it was required, or letting Marina answer for her, staring down at her feet, or out the window, or simply closing her eyes. At first, Marina tried to fill the silence between them, telling Constance about the failed cake she had made the day before, the cat that appeared in her garden crying for milk. But the narration of the small contours of her own daily life faltered in the face of Constance’s silence, the hard stare the girl sometimes turned on her. Marina often felt inept when she was with Constance and yet there was the sense that with every hour they spent together they were binding themselves to each other in an unspoken but irreversible pact.

  Something about Constance reminded Marina of an injured thrush that Ben had found on the dunes one summer on Fire Island and brought home wrapped in his beach towel. The silent fury of the wounded creature, its stubborn huddle in the corner of the cardboard box. They barely knew how to care for the bird, despairing at its refusal to eat or drink anything that they placed before it. Marina remembered Ben’s bewildered sorrow. The starving bird’s eventual miserable succumbing to their proffered crusts of bread did not seem like any kind of victory.

  Constance took the money that Marina slipped into her hand without ever meeting her eyes, a nod of her head instead of any words of thanks. It felt uneasily like a transaction to Marina, as if she were trying to buy her way into the girl’s life. Still, she had seen the figures on the letters from the Public Assistance office – barely enough money for anyone to survive on. Marina was stunned at the paltriness of Constance’s monthly budget. It was no wonder she had not been able to pay for her groceries all those weeks ago. How did she live?

  But was living even the right word for Constance? She seemed to coast along the daily paths of her existence with a glazed sheen to her eyes, a numbed sort of antipathy. She kept herself and the child clean and fed, scrubbed the floors of her apartment with bleach, washed clothes in the kitchen sink, mixed bottles of formula, shopped at the Pathmark grocery store on 125th Street or at the bodega, brought her letters to Marina to decipher. The rest of her life, its pitch and roll, the real shape of it, was a mystery. Sometimes Marina wanted to put her hand over Constance’s, or place her fingers against her cheek, but she always hesitated. What could her touch possibly mean against such a history?

  Downstairs in the kitchen Jacob had folded the paper expertly, as if he were on a train and had only a small space in which to read. He was absorbed, reaching absent-mindedly for his cup of coffee. There was an open jar of marmalade on the table, made for him by a patient, the label carefully hand-printed. He was always bringing these small, tender offerings home. A box of chocolates, a loaf of rye bread, a punnet of raspberries. Technically he should not accept gifts, but he reasoned that it would embarrass his patients if they were refused. Marina stood in the doorway watching Jacob spread marmalade on to his toast. In those first cautious days in California she had longed for this – the drift of newspapers over a kitchen table, a pot of coffee cooling on the counter; these daily intimacies.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee, kissed Jacob on the cheek. He caught hold of her hand. ‘You were up most of the night,’ he said. Her sleeplessness troubled him in the same way that Ben’s sadness did. It was his fear of a deforming shadow, something not steady in her mind. Something that love could not touch. Jacob wanted the people in his care to be well and untroubled, for their griefs to be resolvable ones.

  Marina sat down at the table. The wood gleamed in the sunlight. Jacob looked tired himself. He rubbed his eyes, finished his cup of coffee. ‘I’ve been reading about some birds down in Utah,’ he said. ‘A whole flock of grebes heading south to Mexico crash-landed in a Walmart parking lot. Thousands of them, it says. It took days for them to clear away all the bodies. There were storm clouds that made the concrete look like a flat stretch of water. So the birds landed to rest, but ended up slamming into the pavement.’

  Marina leaned over his shoulder to read the story. ‘There is no precise count of the dead,’ it said, ‘although officials estimated that it exceeded fifteen hundred.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s a sad story. All those birds plung
ing blithely to their deaths,’ said Jacob, spreading out his hands. ‘How are birds supposed to know about things like parking lots?’

  She slipped her arms around him and bent down to rest her face against his shoulder for a moment. Sometimes the texture of his thinking seemed so familiar to her that she felt he might be another, better version of herself.

  Later that morning she stood at the corner of the park waiting for Constance and Gabriel. It was nearly September and she was longing for the weather to change, the haze of heat to recede. There was always such a sense of relief when the fall set in, with its cold spatters of rain and the promise of snow.

  A cluster of pigeons descended upon an abandoned sandwich on the sidewalk with a startling flap of wings. Constance and the child appeared around the corner. Gabriel looked very small. As soon as he saw Marina, he broke free of his mother’s grip and ran towards her. He dived at her, his arms wrapped around her legs.

  If one part of the little boy was rage and fury, the other was reeling hunger, a deprivation Marina could sometimes feel humming in him when she held him. She was surprised at how quickly he had succumbed to her affection, how greedily he had begun to seek her out after his initial wariness. Now he whimpered and scrabbled against her as if he were trying to climb up her body, an urgency to his need. She had heard Jacob speak once about the kind of foraging practised by orphans, or by the children of neglectful or abusive parents. Not for food or shelter, but for affection. For some scrap of sustaining emotion, some recognition. Small kindnesses they could make use of to right themselves in the world. She had done it herself, she realised. A nurse in the Children’s House, a kind teacher in Brooklyn, Mrs Zelman.