Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  I was twenty-seven. I had built the life I thought would bring me security and peace of mind. When I had stayed with Justine in her beautiful home in Moss Beach a few years ago and looked at her life, I’d thought, This is what I need! A home. And I had built it. Yet if there was something I had to face about this birthday in order to move on, it was this: There was nothing I could point to, externally, that would ever bring this transition period to a close and propel me into the future, which I had sacrificed everything to achieve. What had to happen on this birthday was an end to the ritual of measuring, of being hard on myself, of giving myself a time frame in which to achieve the impossible. I was right then, when I thought I needed to build a home, but I found the wrong place to build it: outside myself.

  I knew then that I would not be charting my path anymore. It wasn’t a race or a contest. I would need to learn to be okay with a little uncertainty in my life, a few blurry edges around my personality.

  We drove down into the wilderness of the peninsula en route to Santa Cruz to take Isaac to the beach. On the way there we stopped on a cliff to take a closer look at a slender strip of fog that remained out on the ocean, the rest having burned away. It was bent at one end, like a refracted beam of light; it was reflected in the water as a silvery slash amid the brilliant blue. Two enormous red-tailed hawks cried out above us, and I looked up to see them flying in a circle around a nearly full moon. “You’re almost finished,” they seemed to say to me. “Just hang on a little while longer.”

  My phone rang. It was Isaac’s dad.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you okay? Is Isaac okay?”

  “Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

  “Someone started a rumor that you committed suicide. I freaked out.”

  “That’s ridiculous. No, we’re fine. We’re on our way to the beach.”

  It wasn’t until I ended the call that I noticed all the messages on my phone. I checked in on social media and saw that indeed the rumor was thriving. On Facebook, my friends were tagging me in posts that read “Homicide or suicide?” or “Is it really that hard to leave?”

  I tweeted a photo of Isaac and myself. “We’re having fun at the beach.”

  As I put my phone away and took a last look at the splendid, glittering ocean, I reflected on the irony. Why would anyone believe I could be at the moment of despair now, when I had put those dreadful years of wandering behind me, when I finally knew who I was in my very bones, and my life had just started to feel real? I had left, and it had been worth it, and I had come to cherish my freedom to build a sense of self that was authentic. I was no longer a ghost, threatened with obliteration.

  In September, Markus and his mother came to visit. Isaac had already started second grade, and the leaves had begun to curl by the time they arrived. The weather was glorious, with brilliant blue skies that showcased clean, clear sunsets, like a ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. We rowed across the deserted lake in the evening, the summer crowds having returned to the city after Labor Day, and crunched leaves underfoot as we explored picturesque New England towns.

  I drove them into Manhattan one day, just to show Markus’s mother the city. It was her first visit to the United States, and her first time traveling without her husband. She seemed tremulous throughout, trying to recapture the joy she had always felt while traveling, but which is never the same without your traveling companion.

  We walked through Central Park, tasted gelato in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, and narrowly avoided a collision with a truck driver in the East Village. We drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and I offered to drive them through my old community. It was Sukkos, so the streets would be dead, but the Hasids would be out in full regalia. I pointed out the little wooden huts in people’s front yards, porches, and fire escapes; the holiday was based on the ancient biblical celebration of the harvest, when people slept outside in makeshift huts to watch their crops.

  Ada gazed out the window, transfixed. I drove past the double brownstone I had grown up in. It looked silent and implacable, its window blinds tightly drawn, its heavy metal doors indifferent. In the next house, an old woman sat under the shade of her doorway and stared at me as I drove by. I bent my head to avoid being recognized. At the red light, we paused, and across the street a family of Hasidic Jews crowded on the corner, young girls cooing at their nieces and nephews in strollers, a young couple standing shyly, removed from each other by the mandatory four feet.

  “It’s impossible for me to imagine you here,” Markus said. “I look at you, and I look at them, and I just can’t make the connection.”

  I thought, I can’t either at this point. It doesn’t feel like my past, not when I look at it up close. My life is too different now to accommodate that story. But if this isn’t my past, then what is?

  I drove down Kent Avenue and we parked at the waterfront. We walked down toward the little beach, from which you could see the entire Manhattan skyline. A Hasidic man had wandered over, no doubt trying to find a temporary escape, and he sat on a log with his black hat and coat neatly folded alongside him. He looked away as we approached.

  “Careful,” I told Markus. “Don’t forget that they can understand German.”

  “Right,” he said. “The last thing we would want is for them to figure out you’re a former Jew dating a Nazi.”

  “Actually I was thinking more in terms of your own safety—they just don’t like Germans, period.”

  We posed for a picture then, against the spendid, glittering backdrop. Ada held the bulky camera awkwardly, trying to figure out how to use it, and I froze my smile in patient expectation. But as the flash finally went off, Markus leaned in suddenly to kiss me on the mouth. Later, over a seafood dinner in an outdoor beer garden, I looked at the photo on the camera’s small screen and thought it odd that the surprise and unease I had felt in that moment weren’t at all apparent in the image.

  At night we rolled toward the center of the bed, latching on to each other as if to avoid falling. He, who had never been able to sleep in the same bed with someone, and I, who had lain awake on those nights I spent with Conor, the weight of his arm heavy on my chest.

  It’s crazy how well we fit together, he whispered. Indeed I felt like an oddly shaped key that had finally found the right lock.

  I took them to the local farmers’ market on Saturday.

  “How can this be?” he said as we drove past the exquisite views I had already become accustomed to. “It’s exactly like the postcards! They don’t even have to Photoshop the images.”

  His mother was positively gleeful when we arrived at the market. A bluegrass band strummed in the gazebo, and shoppers milled about in the autumn sunshine. “Just like in the movies,” she whispered, enthralled.

  We ran into various people I knew around town, and so I introduced them. There were my friends Dan and Debbie, Jewish lawyers from New York City, and Anita and Harvey, more Jewish lawyers from New York City. When we returned to the car, loaded up with fresh tomatoes and cheese and jam, Ada’s face had suddenly gone white, and she appeared tired and withdrawn.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her in German, but I couldn’t quite make out her mumbled reply. I nudged Markus. “Ask her what’s going on,” I whispered.

  He turned to his mother. They had a rapid exchange in German.

  “Ah, she’s never met any Jews in real life before,” he said to me. “She’s feeling a bit overwhelmed—actually she feels guilty.” His tone was, as usual, neutral, almost amused.

  “Guilty? Why would she feel guilty?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Because of what her father did. It’s her first time encountering the actual people who were persecuted by him. I think it just hit her.”

  “But I’m Jewish! She wasn’t traumatized when she met me.”

  “True. But I think she’s just starting to process what it means, you know. She nev
er dealt with it before because it didn’t come up.”

  Later, in my living room, I could see her try to recoup. She told us about her memories of her father, about how he had beaten her older brother when he came home talking of a Holocaust film his teacher had shown him. Ada’s father had then visited the teacher in his home and threatened him with violence if he ever showed such filth in his classroom.

  “I was so young I didn’t really understand what was going on,” she said. “But my brother did. Yet we never talked about it as adults. I’m sure he knew much more about our parents than I ever did.”

  “I don’t care about what your parents did,” I said. “I want to live in the present. I want my life to be filled with love and understanding and forgiveness. I don’t want to get stuck with those old grudges and prejudices like the way I grew up. I want to get past it.”

  “Yes, but it’s easier for you, perhaps,” she said. “Only the forgiving can speak this way. The guilty cannot simply say that they want to get past it.”

  We were walking along the lake the next afternoon, Markus and I, and a gentle breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees and creating small ripples in the ponds and streams that collected the lake runoff. I had a sudden memory of my childhood: It was summer, in the Catskills, and I was standing at the edge of an enormous open field of uncut grass. I started to run, and I sprinted across the entire field, my movements like a cat’s, my whole body like a well-oiled machine. The wind picked up my hair and brushed across my cheeks. I had felt gloriously boundless in that precious stolen moment.

  I broke out into a run then, to recapture that feeling that I had forgotten about. I ran the length of the road and then doubled back to meet Markus.

  “You have good form,” he said. “I expected you to run like a girl, knees out, slapping the ground—but you’re a real runner. And you looked so happy and free, with your hair flying out behind you.”

  “I’m not a runner, though. No one has ever told me I can run.”

  “If you run like that without any training, then you’re definitely a runner. You should try it, see what happens.”

  Later he played soccer with Isaac, teaching him to kick, to dribble, to pass. I sat on the lawn and watched. The late-afternoon sun glowed brightly from across the lake, blurring their outlines until they became shifting shadows against the light, as if they had disappeared into another world, another dimension. I was stuck as if behind a glass, viewing.

  This feeling, of fitting together in a way that felt suspiciously part of some grand design, some greater story I couldn’t quite recall but that filtered into my dreams as if from a past life, scared me for precisely that reason. Such a feeling was dangerous; its power did not promise happiness, but rather the opposite. There was love that nourished you, I thought, and then there was this kind of love, that grew independently like a tumor on your soul, starving your spirit until it disappeared. The feeling was too big for me.

  I drove them both back to the airport that evening, feeling numb. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel once he was gone. At the drop-off point, Markus looked at me and said, “It’s like going skydiving. You know you have a parachute strapped to your back, but it still feels like falling to your death. That’s what it feels like to be leaving you right now.” He laughed weakly, his eyes tired. I saw in his face the same exhaustion I had felt earlier. The feeling was too strong, too intense—there was no way he wasn’t feeling knocked off his balance like I was.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said briskly. “The parachute will open. We’ll go back to our routines.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He watched me drive off from the curb, holding his backpack with both hands. In the rearview mirror I glanced back at his forlorn face, just once. I was still numb then, and stayed that way for the whole way home, and slept that way, too, turned away from where his body had been the night before, like some inexhaustible furnace to which I had been drawn for warmth.

  I went down to the lake later that week, to watch the sunset. We had sat there a few days before and picked flowers, and I had cried.

  “I’m scared to keep going,” I had said. “Won’t it hurt less if we stop now?”

  “Why do you have to cut the rope already?” he had asked.

  Because that’s all I’m good at.

  Now I watched as a heron skimmed the still waters for fish. The lake was silent. There were no boats, and most of the houses that fronted it were empty of their summertime residents. This time of year the lake began to feel like my private property.

  I thought about distance, then, about my pattern of forming attachments to people who lived farther and farther away that had formed itself over the last few years. I wondered if it was as simple as perpetuating my own alienation, or if somehow I understood that by moving the goalpost ever farther, I was galvanizing myself to travel as far from my roots as possible.

  In my life, I have expended so much effort in order to put distance between myself and the place I come from, and yet there still seems to be this chasm lying ahead of me, reminding me how far I truly have to go before I sleep, as Frost put it. Yet I wonder now if it is fair to say that I was pushing myself toward my dreams all along, instead of alienating them, in this process of assigning myself such long journeys.

  These people that come from far away to breathe newness into my life; they move me. It is as if I am a playing piece on some enormous chessboard, inching along to victory in the grip of a shrewd mastermind intent on taking the long view. The strategy seems unfathomable at times, but I cannot deny that I am still on the board, advancing in the direction of an end goal. Though what awaits me on the other side I cannot guess, what a marvelous thrill it is, at times—contemplating that unknown shore toward which my inner compass invariably strains.

  I find my young self now—sinking into my consciousness suddenly and heavily like quicksilver—twelve years old, sitting outside the principal’s office. Even at that age, I’m getting into trouble for things I can’t quite understand.

  This time I know the rabbi will call my grandfather, my grandfather will call my aunt, and I’ll get weeks of lectures and intense supervision because of something I said, or wore, or did in school without noticing. I’m sitting on the hard wooden bench swinging my legs, and my shoulders are hunched and I’m looking at the scuffed floor, and I can feel my eyes stinging, because I’m sad and weary, and I feel it’s unfair.

  I start to pray. I have one prayer, Psalm 13, which I say over and over when I find myself in difficult situations. I’ve memorized it by now. I whisper it now to myself, in Hebrew:

  How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart by day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Behold Thou, and answer me, O Lord my God; lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death; lest mine enemy say: “I have prevailed against him”; lest mine adversaries rejoice when I am moved. But as for me, in Thy mercy do I trust; my heart shall rejoice in Thy salvation. I will sing unto the Lord, because He hath dealt bountifully with me.

  And then, sometime after the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth iteration, the door to the office opens, and it’s the secretary, saying the principal is too busy to see me today, and I should head back to class.

  Oh the joy I experienced on that short walk back to the classroom, knowing I had been saved from certain punishment! How to describe the wonder in fathoming that with my prayer I might have reached over some looming wall to something powerful and magical on the other side that could save me! Still today I search within myself for that spirit, rendered lost and aimless by my subsequent alienation from all things familiar, clinging to the belief that somewhere in there is still the ability to manifest the impossible, see the invisible, touch another dimension.

  In March of 2013, I attended the annual Poets & Writers fund-raising d
inner, where it was a long-standing tradition for each table to have its own writer as a host. At the beginning of the event, an MC announced each writer, asking us to stand up and be introduced to the audience, and I watched as brilliant and acclaimed authors rose from their seats, one by one, to be applauded. My name was called between Erica Jong’s and Siri Hustvedt’s, and as I stood up between the two of them and realized suddenly what my standing meant, my knees buckled and I had to hold on to the table to stay upright. I was standing beside writers I had worshipped and adored as a reader for so many years. I had never actually stopped to consider that I was a writer now too, that it was real, and I had made the transition into that community, giving back to the world with my words, with my voice.

  And I went back to the little girl in the purple dress then, and asked her with a smile, “Did you ever think this is where we’d be?”

  And I know, for a fact, that she never did. In that moment I gave her my hand to hold, and together we sat there on the stoop, looking out onto the empty street of our past. We were finally reunited, she and I, and everything was fine, just like I had promised.

  acknowledgments

  First I must thank my agent, Patricia Van der Leun. I can’t believe we’ve worked on two books together now; it seems just yesterday that we met in that café on 74th. When I am too stuck in my own story to see things clearly, you light my way through the fog. I don’t know if I would have the fortitude to continue along this path without that kind of support.