We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  Soma

  Melanie keeps asking me if I want to go home early, see a doctor on the mainland about my leg. No, I insist, I’m fine. She inspects my knee and ankle, mutters, “But you were in so much pain, it doesn’t make sense.” Nerve pain, she tells me. Early indications of sciatica? I don’t tell her about the dream about Grandma Charna. I don’t want to freak her out. When I tell her I tripped on a log and dropped my iPhone on the beach, she says, surprising me, “Good, maybe now you’ll stop googling all that crazy shit about Nazi psychos in Surrey,” and slides pancakes onto my plate, and I realize she’s been checking my browser history or watching me while I scroll obsessively after dinner. “Can I use your phone?” I ask, and she doesn’t answer, passes me the maple syrup. While I eat, the dream replays on endless loop in my mind. Why does Grandma Charna want me to know her mother’s Hebrew name? I know little about her parents. They fled the anti-Jewish raids near the Black Sea. Left their families behind. That’s just what people did, thinking their families would follow or they could return for them later. Nobody could have known what was coming—the borders closing, all the Jews registered, the liquidation. Thousands marched in circles around icy fields for weeks, to reduce the numbers. The Atlantic, the new wall between life and death. Don’t bother waiting for the sea to part; get a fake visa instead. I know that her mother died young and that her father lived on for a long time, died from a heart attack in synagogue, was a very religious man. “He died while reciting the Kaddish, of course,” Grandma Charna told me, and chuckled. It was often impossible to tell if she was joking. I don’t even know his first name. They all made up fake English names when they arrived anyway. Her sister Hannah was also devout, became more religious in her later years, and lived between Jerusalem and Winnipeg. Grandma Charna was the black sheep. She never talked about the controversy created by her marriage to Grandpa Louis. In those days, it was unheard of, to marry outside. People fled and kept to themselves, especially after the Holocaust. Grandma Charna had her five babies. Born during and after the Holocaust—her second baby, my father, in 1945. “Your father’s birth ended the Holocaust,” she told me when I was six or seven, and chuckled. Humour, how we give and keep at the same time. How we make each other remember. Melanie loves to drive down every side road when we travel. Our little hatchback jounces over stones and potholes, and my leg aches gently. I shift in my seat, away from the ache. Melanie points out a minor waterfall, a field of alpacas bred for sweaters for trust-fund nomads.

  “I love it that people just sort of move to these islands to check out and make stuff,” she says. “Don’t you think we’d be happier if we lived here and not in the city? They must be desperate for vets who would move here. Do you want to go for a walk?” She points to a sign. “It’s to the beach that’s supposed to have the best view of the channel.”

  I smile at her. “Are you trying to refocus my attention onto something constructive outside of myself?” I tease.

  “Yes.” She hesitates. “Is your leg going to be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  We start off down the path toward the ocean.

  Charna

  Hannah’s baby comes fast. The midwife unravels the umbilical cord deftly from her neck, slaps her back, declares her here. I crawl into bed with my sister, her body an empty glove. Tateleh, when he runs into the room, is like I’ve never seen him before. “Baruch hashem,” Tateleh says. “Baruch hashem,” Hannah’s Joshua echoes. Their voices full of awe, their eyes underwater caves flooded with wonder. “Baruch hashem,” I repeat obediently. I eye the tiny scarlet face. Blank eyes. No one in our family can come here anymore, but here you are. A magic trick. A human from nothing. Did you fly through a tunnel under the ocean, above the stars? Did you travel with a visa issued by G-d? Who did you meet at the right cocktail party, who you could slip a stack of bills for a safe passage? Did you say at the border between life and death that you are not a Jew? Did an angel change your name in a registration book while the man with the pen had his back turned? Did you fly here around the North and South Poles? Stowaway in the wide empty between worlds. What is wrong with me that I think these dark thoughts at a moment like this one? The baby wails, pumps oxygen frantically in and out. I concentrate on her face. The midwife wipes her clean. Fresh from my sister’s spare room. Here. Our shul and apartments are so full of the missing, those who will never arrive, and yet here you are, a little girl who will make more Jews someday. How strange, how wondrous. Tateleh recites a blessing. I utter the Hebrew rapidly through my tears. Hannah moans. The midwife gives me a bottle of water and I hold it to my sister’s mouth. “Touch her,” she tells me. The baby’s scalp quivers under my palm, like something inanimate coming to life.

  According to our tradition, the child receives the names of relatives, but if she’s named for a living relative, the angel of death may get confused and take the baby instead of the old person. Tateleh tells Hannah when I am not there (she tells me later, when he goes out for groceries) that he has been writing letters to his parents, brother and sisters for a year now and there has been no answer. He has never mentioned any letters to me. What does he think I would do? Crash to the floor wailing and beat it with my womanly fists? Nu. I may be only twenty-five, but I know what’s what. People are people are people. I read the news. And, a strange thing I have never told anyone, that sometimes—no, often—when I look deeply into a person’s eyes, I can tell what they’re thinking. The sentences and motivations slide around under their gaze like a deck of cards being shuffled and reshuffled. People rarely surprise me. If you watch for long enough, they will reveal themselves. But my trick doesn’t work on Louis. He is so easy, so light. So unlike the boys I grew up with, shouldering an unseen freight. Louis does not even know how to pray. I have never met someone with nothing to hide.

  Louis and Tateleh sit across from each other. Tateleh spreads butter on slices of black bread, asks me to bring the pot of tea from the kitchen. He is doing that thing where he takes too long with a simple task, in order to observe the person sitting across from him. Louis is pretzelled in his suit, trying not to look like a little boy. When they speak to each other, I am sharply aware of his Yiddish accent; it’s so rare that I hear him speak English. English makes him sound hesitant, uneducated. Louis speaks rapidly, and I watch Tateleh’s eyebrows swarm around his forehead, as he decodes and maps out his sentences. His world – home, shul, work, friends—is in Yiddish. He tells Louis, “Call me Izzy.” A fake English name, silly-sounding, like a dog’s name. Louis stares at Tateleh’s yarmulke, and I can read his thoughts: he is wondering if he will ever have to wear one. Walk around with a sign that says JEW. No, I’ve always known that Louis won’t convert. He wouldn’t be accepted even if he tried—lanky like an adolescent deer, a tall standing wave of smooth hair, blue eyes, guilelessness. Tateleh leans forward and pushes a slice of bread into his mouth, chews slowly.

  Louis says, “I’m very sorry about what’s happening over there.” The war is underway. When a young man at shul enlisted, Tateleh had shaken his head and scoffed, “Imagine, a Jew going there on purpose. Meshuga.”

  Tateleh chews for a long time, sips tea. “Happen before, happen again,” he says. He shrugs. “Tsuris.” His word for everything.

  After a while, Louis gives up and eats bread and drinks tea. I stand in the kitchen doorway. Tateleh asks me to bring in a plate of herring and crackers.

  Louis asks me, “Do you have any cheese?”

  Tateleh releases a low rumble. “No cheese with this,” I say for him. Louis’s eyes startle and stretch a bit; he recovers quickly. Tateleh shoves the plate toward him. “You have problem with me? Eat fish.” He laughs. Louis looks down, places a cracker on his pink tongue.

  After Louis leaves to walk home to his parents’ house two neighbourhoods away, I sit across from Tateleh, reading the newspaper. Tateleh watches me.

  “You shouldn’t read so much about the war,” he says. �
��It will make you sad.”

  I decide to ask him. “Did you hear from your brother?” His brother is younger than him, has a number of children.

  “Nothing.” He chews, his hazel eyes settling on me. “We will wait.”

  “But this seems different,” I start to argue. “There are more countries—”

  “Nu? Always we are blamed.”

  He slides a finger around his plate, exhausted from the encounter with Louis. He has asked me to not tell my friends about the engagement; to give him time to tell the people at shul first. He thinks that will make things easier on me.

  “Is that why you left?”

  He sighs. “First the army.”

  “The army?”

  “Russian army. Every Jewish family had to give a boy.”

  “I didn’t know you were in the army.”

  “A horrible thing, being a Jew in the Russian army.”

  “Oh.”

  “They kick me, they scream Yid, I fight for them.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then, pogroms. All the time, pogroms.”

  “Were you in a pogrom?”

  He lifts his hands. “Of course! How not to be? They come to our villages, burn our houses, take our women. They hang my rabbi from a tree.”

  I stare at him, wordless. After a lifetime of silence, why is he telling me all of this now? I’m not ready.

  “How many pogroms were you in?” I ask.

  He lifts a hand and pulls it through the air in front of him. “One looooooooong pogrom. Who can remember.” He points at the newspaper. “Now yes, there is more. But always the same. People are people are people. People are tsuris.”

  “I know.”

  “Never trust, Charna. Never trust.”

  I nod.

  “And now, Hannah has her baby. We start over. Nu?” He stares at me, eyes oddly glazed, the table vast between us. “Still, you want to marry him?”

  I shrug.

  He shakes his head. “Life is hard. Why make more problems.”

  I’m not like Hannah, devout and content with a husband who is stupider than her and never has a word to say, but wears the right kind of thing on his head.

  “It will be hard for your children.” He gets up to leave. “He’s a nice boy, even if he’s not a Jew. Baruch hashem.”

  Blessed.

  Soma

  The ocean is blessed with boundless light as we emerge from the dark of the forest. Melanie tramps ahead of me. I’m relieved that the yahrzeit is over, as I am every year, that old feeling evaporating from my bones, temporary dark marrow. With this yahrzeit done, I’m the same age Grandma Charna was when the Holocaust was over. Maybe this will be the last year I will go through this during her yahrzeit. One day, my grief will be normal. The ocean sends blue emergency flares through spaces between the black branches. Melanie yells back at me, “Oh my god oh my god, wait till you see, it’s so beautiful!” I study the ground ahead of me for roots, gigantic on this part of the coast, muscled arms reaching out of the earth. Melanie calls to me to hurry up. She read about this beach weeks ago while she was googling everywhere to go on the island; it’s a medical-school dropout hangover, her love of detail. She’s at the edge of the shining water, waving at me. How did I end up with someone like her? Someone easy, competent. From this beach we can see the whole channel, the dark edges of neighbouring islands mushrooming from the water, streaked black and white with atmosphere. As we walk along the edge of the ocean, Melanie points out the islands and names them. We walk for a long time, around a narrow point where the black rock juts out, crusted with oysters. The next beach is flooded with mist. Melanie shrieks softly and grabs my hand when three figures materialize several metres in front of us. The mist has made us distance-blind. A woman and two men stand on the sand, dressed formally in black suits and white dress shirts. The woman is holding a thick leather-bound book and one of the men holds a bottle of champagne.

  “Hi,” Melanie says.

  The woman says, “I guess you aren’t David and Derek.”

  “What?” Melanie says.

  “Maybe we should get going,” one of the men says.

  “No, no, no. We need to wait a bit longer,” the other man says. I notice their wingtip shoes, which the salt and sand will scar and ruin.

  “It’s been an hour.”

  “Sorry,” Melanie says. “We’re just on a walk.”

  “We’re witnesses.”

  “Witnesses?”

  The woman interrupts. “I’m a marriage commissioner.”

  “The couple is extremely late,” one of the witnesses says.

  “I bet Dave fucking bailed,” the other witness says, and stares disconsolately at the ocean.

  The marriage commissioner sighs. “This is rare, but it happens.”

  “How often?” one of the witnesses asks.

  “I’ve been doing this five years and it’s happened about eight times.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Not really. Better early than never.”

  “I suppose.”

  “How long can you wait?” Melanie says.

  “It depends. An hour is normally my limit.”

  One of the witnesses grabs his phone from his pocket, releases a long moan. “They’re not coming.”

  Melanie turns to me. “I think we should do it.”

  “What?”

  “Can you marry us?”

  The marriage commissioner stares. She’s in her sixties; maybe this is her retirement project, to marry gay couples on remote windswept beaches.

  She hesitates. “Technically, yes. All we need is two witnesses.”

  “Let’s do it!”

  “How long have you been together?” one of the witnesses says.

  “Four years.”

  The other witnesses hold up the bottle of Veuve Clicquot. “I have booze,” says one.

  “Come on, babe,” Melanie says to me. Her eyes glow with something manic close to transcendence. The witnesses in the background hold up their arms in excitement. “If we don’t do it now, we never will.”

  Charna

  We are married with few witnesses. Hannah comes with Joshua, who looks so tired. Louis’s mother comes, but his father doesn’t. Louis has shielded me from how unhappy his family is that he’s marrying a Yid. I know why Tateleh isn’t here—because no rabbi will officiate a marriage like this one. Some of Louis’s friends from work are here, and some cousins and an uncle from out of town. No one from our shul is here. I thought I might feel brave and free today, but instead I feel I’ve eaten bad fish and am going to tip over. I’ve never been inside a church before. Louis’s family isn’t religious, but his mother has friends who come here, and the Protestant minister agreed. He shook my hand respectfully and patted my shoulder. I refuse to be a passive receptacle for anyone’s pity. The English blessings are stiff, foreign, not the supple weave of Hebrew. I focus on Louis’s face, his gentle features. We want to have a baby right away. I will name our child according to Ashkenazi tradition, I have decided, with my mother’s initials. Louis has agreed. “We can do whatever we want,” he’s told me. I warned him what would happen, the wave of disapproval—silence—that would descend on me, the disappearance of all invitations, the women no longer greeting me in Yiddish in the street. A man in Tateleh’s tea circle has stopped attending, sent a letter accusing Tateleh of allowing me to go against our people. I know, I know: with so many dead and dying, how could I leave? Zev Guttman embraced me and said, “We are still mishpocheh.” It’s not the same for Louis. The service is simple. Hannah yells, “Mazel tov.” Louis’s mother claps and claps and claps. Louis jumps up and down three times. We eat white cake with buttercream and fruit in the basement. Hannah gives me a box from Tateleh. In it is his book of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories and a gold-and-blue siddur in Hebrew. I o
pen the cover and there is my name, Hannah’s name, and our mother’s name in faint cursive, with our Hebrew names in flawless script. He could not be here, so he sent her instead. Hannah takes the siddur from my hands. “Why didn’t he give this to me when I was married?” she says competitively. “I didn’t know he had this.” I take the book back, hold it in my hands. I know why Tateleh has done this. This siddur came with them from their shtetl, their home. I think until the end that he will come to the reception, rush in, make a surprise appearance. He does not. He is at shul, or with his friends drinking tea, or out walking along the Red River.

  Three families arrive in our shul from Czechoslovakia, smuggled out by relatives. Hannah repeats to us their stories from the women’s prayer circle, of neighbours stripped naked in the street and herded onto a train. People going and no people coming back. Tateleh gets up from the table and leaves my apartment. “I don’t want to listen to this.” I think about the night he and Basha argued about the letters. I know from Hannah that the letter-writing circle has continued to convene, but I am no longer invited. I hold my belly, filling with our first child, read the newspaper, and worry and worry and worry.

  What a horrible world we are trapped in. I ask myself, why are we here during this time? Maybe it’s cruel, I tell Hannah, to bring a Jew into this world.

  Soma

  She chose to be cremated, against Jewish tradition, so that her ashes could be scattered in the same place as Grandpa Louis’s. In her tradition, her body belonged to g-d and should be returned untouched; but for Grandma Charna, her body had changed hands over her lifetime. We gathered—her children, grandchildren, four great-grandchildren. I held her ashes and allowed them to run through the spaces between my fingers into the Pacific. My brother refused to touch the ashes, backed up, saying he was too afraid. That night I slept in a bed in a hotel room with my brother. I woke in the middle of the night and there was Charna. She was a grey entity, sailing swiftly through the air. On one side of my vision there was a grey rocky expanse; on the other, a green island. Grandma Charna flew back and forth, back and forth, whipping through the air, between the grey rock and the green island. She had her wry expression on her face and my ears filled with her high, choppy, unmistakable laughter. I woke sitting up on the hotel bed, the room shaken bright. There is always a choice, she was showing me. You can move between. I slipped downward, awakened in the morning, as if from a drugged sleep, head pounding, full of a pain like the ballooning weight of an infected tooth. I hadn’t drunk water in days, my muscles moaned, grasping my bones. My breath powdery. I felt afraid to open my eyes. Then, when I did, just the faint electric hotel glow and my brother’s voice shimmered blind starlight above me.