by Alex Leslie
She followed me for years. Just when I’d think she was gone, she would come back, her face sharp as ever in my dreams, making herself known. Stowaway.
Charna
In spite of their tall, fair, pale father, my children are dark-haired with brooding eyes. My first, a girl, looks like Hannah, my second like Tateleh, born the year the war ends. A stocky, wailing spirit, a black broom of hair. As my son grows, the news comes. The first time I see photos of the strange skeleton people holding the wire at the border of the camp, I bend and retch between my shoes onto the grocery store’s grey floor. It is more horrible than any of us could have conjured. There was so much rumour and speculation that when the truth does come, it is not true. It is not. A fever dream. Tateleh does not speak of it and I do not bring it up. I have learned from him, it’s best not to poke around where you’re not welcome. After all, I’m not young anymore. He visits with bags of hamantaschen and holds the boy. No news has travelled here at all from eastern Ukraine. The newspaper humans are all chest bone and stripe, digit and eye socket. My second baby, born the year the war ended. I feed him dumplings cooked in schmaltz, I feed him cake, I feed him soup. I cannot let him out of my sight. When he goes with Hannah and her children to the store, I sit at the window and worry, worry, worry. I imagine him lying on the road, Hannah hit by a car. I imagine him staggering freely down the street, a woman in a coat lifting him and stealing him away. At shul we hear things that are not in the newspaper. A family burned alive in their home, doors blocked by their neighbours, a piano used as a barricade. One man who survived by living in the forest, in a hole. For two years. A fairy tale. Something a child makes up about a forest. Sometimes I think they are unlucky, my children, to have a mother who has heard so much tsuris, who cannot read a newspaper without feeling sick. No, they are lucky to have a mother who sees things as they are, who will never tell them lies. Who will never say what they want to hear. Who knows, there are only people and what we do to each other. The news worsens, spreads its deep glow east as my boy continues to learn to speak and walk. He will never know these things, this awfulness that won’t stop chasing us, even an ocean away. A Russian tells Tateleh at shul that he travelled west across Ukraine and Poland and saw the razed villages. None left. Finished. Done. Tateleh sits on our deck and drinks tea, and then our wine, not kosher, for hours. Tells Louis to leave him be. He wants to be alone. He was right all along. All those letters written were for nothing, written to no one. Canada did not care. I watch him through my kitchen window as I rinse and stack my yellow plates. His hat on his knees. What is he thinking? Is he thinking about the day he left? His shtetl a secret world buried between his ears. Shared with no one. Perhaps in bits, with his friends, in Yiddish. Never any word from his brother, and now?
Nu. Who can tell.
My boy, born in the year of the news of the dying, is playful and light as Louis. He floats easily between people. Sits on Tateleh’s knee, shrieks with happiness. The eyelids, thick hoods; the hazel fields of their irises; the large hands sailing on the waves of laughter; and their shrugs, just the same, easy and heavy.
The borders are open now and the remnant drift into our streets, Tateleh’s shul.
Hannah invites me again to her Hadassah gatherings at her apartment, and I scoop the herring into the Lazy Susan, heap crackers in the centre.
“Sholem aleichem, Charna,” Basha says when she arrives.
I expect her snark but instead she asks how Tateleh is doing, and when I say, “Not well,” she nods.
She says, “It is horrible, horrible. The Ukrainians were the worst, they say.” Another woman nods. “The Ukrainians were the worst,” she repeats, chewing.
How do they know this? How does anyone know anything, these days? Stories seep out of the cracks somehow.
“The Ukrainians, savages, they treated the Jews like dogs,” Basha goes on.
She stares at me, waiting for a reaction. I stare blankly back at her. I have nothing to give her. We have no news. I am afraid to ask Tateleh now, to reawaken his grief. I remember the night in the kitchen when he told me about the pogroms, his rabbi hanged in a tree, his voice flinty and quiet. The few people who survived traded stories in the displaced persons camps, compared notes of disappeared places. Some of them have joined Tateleh’s tea circle and perhaps he can ask what he needs to ask there. None of the women ask after Louis, but I understand why. You can only expect so much from people.
Soma
Melanie won’t talk to me during the ride back to the cabin. I drive and she gazes through the window, her chin tilted away, contained fury. She flings her bag down by the door, goes upstairs and climbs into bed. I take her iPhone out of her bag, input her passcode (her mother’s birthday), and google “nazi” and “surrey” and “vancouver” and “canada.” Last night there was a bomb threat at the Jewish Community Centre in Vancouver. The article says that children’s aquatic classes and a concert were evacuated, police searched the building, and no bomb was found. There’s a new ban on Muslims entering the States. Is this how it begins? I put her phone back in her bag.
I make two cups of tea and climb the stairs.
The quilt is pulled up over her head.
“I made tea,” I say.
When I lie down beside her, she rolls away.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She emerges, tears and sweat. Her hair a deep and wild hive. “I can’t believe you,” she shouts hoarsely.
“Why do we need to be married?”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“It was just so—sudden.”
We face each other. Her shoulders tremble.
“Everything doesn’t have to be picked over for a thousand years,” she spits.
The marriage commissioner and witnesses wandered off into the mist in subdued disappointment when it became clear that a spontaneous wedding wouldn’t be happening.
“This whole trip was about your grandmother for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That prayer. Your whole family is like this.”
How did she know about Kaddish?
“Why can’t you just let yourself be happy?”
Curled on the couch downstairs, I check my email on her phone while she rests. There’s a note from my father. He’s forwarded me several articles about the bomb threats in Vancouver. He wants to know if I’m taking any classes at the Jewish Community Centre anytime soon. I want to write back to him, these people are nuts, extremists. A radical fringe group in their brief heyday. It will die down, soon, give it time. But I know not to reply. An update on the trip would only set off a fresh cascade of worries. Did you see a doctor about your leg? Do you have Tylenol? How are you sleeping? And eating? When will you be back where I can see you?
Charna
I go with Tateleh to Shabbat to pay my respects for Zev Guttman. It is my first time back in shul since I married Louis. There is talk about Zev’s suicide—it is against G-d to take one’s own life. Can we know what is against G-d? Perhaps blind obedience is the worst sin of them all. Zev’s sister and her family were on that ship turned back in the Pacific when this whole nasty mess was starting. Every member of his family perished in camps. He sent money, wrote letters. Zev Guttman, a prominent lawyer, he could do nothing. “A waste of life,” Tateleh says to me, furiously. “A waste of life. They should hang William Lyon Mackenzie King in the street.” People came here believing they would get established, then bring their families over, only to look over their shoulders and see their footsteps disappearing behind them. A cruel joke played by G-d. The shul is exactly the way I remember. Siddurs piled on a table at the door. Dust, paper, sweat. Every childhood Saturday. I feel people staring at me; I will always be the woman who turned her back, not quite a shiksa, but something in between, a hybrid, not to be trusted. But I don’t care about them—I am here for Zev, who always said hello to me in the street
after I married Louis unlike the yentes who snubbed me, Zev who came to Tateleh’s tea circles every week during the years of endless tsuris. I have often wondered how the men of Tateleh’s generation, the ones who came alone and learned their worlds evaporated behind them, could bear it. To be left behind, to go without, to never know. How could they say Kaddish for so many dead, for those who vanished in great groups? This prayer has always been the one that reaches for something underneath my doubt. The prayer I have missed, felt its weekly absence. Our prayer of mourning, yet it makes no mention of mourning, is only a sustained praise of G-d. The prayer we recite to ease the transfer of a soul from one world to another. After death, there are still things we need. I have said this prayer in unison with Tateleh innumerable times over my lifetime. When he is gone, I will say these words for him. We repeat and repeat and repeat as the beloved travels farther away through time, until they are the shape of our voice. Only life upon all of us. When I am gone, who will say Kaddish for me? Only the wry laughter of my children, named for our beloveds from the other world. Mighty be the name. Only the praise and the consolation. Only the beauty of creation, beyond blessing and song.
Soma
The ferry crossing is a single rotation of a crystal glass.
We don’t speak.
I go upstairs on my own. Melanie stays on the car deck, scrolling through her iPhone, a magic portal I am not permitted to access.
I browse the magazines and drink hot chocolate, leaning against the window. Children press themselves to the windows at the front and search the Pacific for non-existent whales. They’re all dead, I want to tell them. Or have consumed so much pollution that they may as well be mobile nuclear reactors, roaming the ocean. I laugh, and a kid stares at me.
“What’s so funny?” the kid says.
“Nothing,” I say.
“You’re sitting by yourself laughing?” he says.
“Crazy lady,” I hear him mutter as I walk away.
Fuck you, you damn kid.
When I get into the car, the radio is pumping country hits, and Melanie turns and holds up her phone. “I got an email from your dad.”
“Yeah?”
“He wants to know if you’re okay. Did you tell him what happened on the beach?”
“No, of course not.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
She exhales. “Okay.”
“What did his email say?”
“Oh, the usual. I hope you guys are having a good time. Lots of dolphin emoticons. Wants us to come over for dinner next week. You know, seven times.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Yeah, I thought I might just write back, ‘Thanks for your note, your daughter spent our trip in mourning, inexplicably injured her leg, disappeared in the middle of the night for a mysterious expedition, and humiliated me on the beach in front of total strangers after I made a spontaneous declaration of love.’” She puts her phone into her pocket. “‘Wish you were here.’”
“There aren’t enough dolphin emoticons for that one.”
We watch passengers return to their cars.
I point out the kid from upstairs. “That kid was an asshole to me.”
“What?”
“He called me a crazy lady.”
“Why?”
“They were all looking for whales, and I was thinking about telling them that all the whales are probably dead and then I started to laugh.”
“I’ve explained to you before that other people can’t hear your thoughts.”
“Their loss.”
I take the sandwiches out of the glove compartment and pass one to her.
“Does your dad know?” she says, chewing.
“Know what?”
“The stuff about your grandma.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. How once a year, on her death-iversary, you act like you’re losing your mind.”
I chew. “After we scattered her ashes, I told him I saw her cross over, and he didn’t seem surprised.”
I feel her eyes on my cheek, like the heat of a strong light. “Really?” She waits. “Did he say anything?”
“Yeah, he said, he waited for her to come to him, and she didn’t.”
We listen to car motors cough awake one by one, the ocean groan and roll its head against the ship.
“That’s really sad,” she says finally, chewing.
“It’s not sad. It’s just how we are.”
She breaks pieces of her sandwich off with her fingers, eats them one by one.
“I feel bad for your dad.”
“Why?”
“Stuck in the middle.”
I remember how, once during undergrad, when I’d emailed my father records I’d found of our relatives who’d been killed, he’d called me up and said, “Why do you need to be a gravedigger?” Does that make you a grave? I’d thought, bitterly.
“I’m sorry about this weekend,” I say. “All of it. It was awful.”
“What about now?” Melanie asks.
“She’s gone now,” I say. “I can tell. It’s over.”
“Are you just saying that to make me happy?”
I look at her. Her eyes large, questioning.
“It’s the truth.”
“How can we tell?”
I want a Jewish wedding, I tell her. I want to invite people and feed them. I just want it to be normal. Yes, she says. I just need more time, I say.
I always need more time.
What if I run out?
Wait, and there’s nothing?
I’ve missed my chance?
There will never be enough.
Always best to save some for later.
She knows me too well to be reassured. She places her hand beside mine on the steering wheel and for a moment, I swerve.
Charna
I have often thought, how could something like that take only a handful of years? The longer I live, the more I think about it. My head hurts to think about it so much. Years after the war was over, I finally asked Tateleh, did he ever get word from anyone. He held his hands up apart from each other in a shell. No one. My boy asks me where we are from. A natural question, but very annoying. The question does something to me, makes an animal curl at the base of my spine. I tell him, you were born here. If you want proof, I have the proof in the stretch marks. You don’t believe me? Nu? You don’t believe me? Go off, then. See how far that gets you. I won’t give you a pretty story with a coat of fresh paint. See where it gets you, to go looking around there in all that mess. Walk yourself backwards off a cliff, see how it goes. Flat on your back, looking at the stars. What did you expect. A miracle? No, this isn’t something you read in a book. This is real history. You’ll just get yourself all worked up, thinking about these things. You can think and think and think and have nothing to show for it. People. Sometimes, there is nothing to understand. Listen to your mother. Anyway, it’s years ago now, who can remember. The people I know who lived through it don’t even like to talk about it, and so who am I to bother them? So. You leave people to their memories. The past takes care of itself if you let it, settles down on its own. The rest doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be so complicated. People make things complicated with all this thinking and thinking, but actually things are very simple. There’s nothing for you there, only sadness. Where are you from? Like the goys say—immaculate conception. I named you for my mother, may her memory be for a blessing. Her name is written into yours. I wanted you and I made you. We are here and that is all there is. And, in any case, I forget. The Black Sea is all I remember, and the rest, who knows. The Ukrainians were the worst. That I know. Murderers, all of them. They tried to get rid of us. Your grandfather didn’t like to talk about these things, and I suppose I got it from him. The not talki
ng. He didn’t like to talk about where he was from. You don’t need to be a genius to understand why. Just look around you. You still want to bother me with your questions? Life is long, but not long enough to understand the things that happened over there. The things I heard, you wouldn’t believe, you wouldn’t want to know. The things people do to people. If I told you the things I heard, you would never forgive me. Your ears would fall off your head. When you have children, they will never need to worry about any of these meshuga things. All this. Best to leave it behind. For what, do you want to know? Things happen. Horrible things, normal things. And so? Who can tell the difference sometimes. People are people are people. Why do you want to upset me? Listen to me. You can be different. You don’t need to go rummaging around. There’s nothing there for you. You were always a happy boy. Only listen to me when I say, nothing good will come of digging up what is already done. It’s in the past now. It’s done. Don’t come around with your questions. Only sit with me. Only sit at my table and eat my food. Never leave me.
Self-Help Liturgy