She shook her head and pointed to the door of the conference room. “Are they done? Can we go in there?”
“Of course.” I hurried back down the hall to the empty room. She followed behind me at a slower pace. It seemed as if all her energy was gone.
We walked in and I closed the door. I sat down and watched as she carefully lowered herself into the chair next to me. I grabbed a tissue from the box on the table and handed it to her.
She wiped her eyes. “It’s not the baby,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything is all right with the baby.”
“Thank God.” I breathed. “What is it, then?”
“It’s Jacob.” She looked down at her hands, and started twisting the gold ring on her swollen finger.
“What’s wrong? Is he upset about the baby?” I tried to think of words to console her, wondering, after being married for less than a year, and having only known each other for a couple of months, how ready they were to become parents. “Listen, he wouldn’t be the only first-time father who was worried about a new baby. It’s a huge change. He’ll adjust, believe me.” I patted her hand.
“It’s not that. He’s been cheating on me.”
I stared at her, stunned into silence.
“And I wasn’t at the doctor this morning. I went to see our rabbi. I went to talk to him, to ask him what I should do.”
I let out a long breath before I spoke. “What did he say?”
“Nothing helpful.” I could see a glint of anger behind the sadness in her eyes. “Apparently Jacob had a girlfriend, all along, before I ever knew him. From outside the community, of course. That’s why the matchmaker was in such a hurry to marry him off. They – his family, the rabbi - wanted to get him away from ‘bad influences.’ But it didn’t work. He never gave her up.”
“Aviva, are you sure?” I reached out and touched her arm. “How do you know? Could it just be a rumor?”
“Her name is Angela,” she recited in a bitter, matter-of-fact way. “She’s twenty-eight. They met at work. I heard all about it over the weekend.” Her face was flushed as she absently stroked her belly. “I didn’t want to say anything to anyone, but I was suspicious. All the late nights in the office. All the times he ducked out of the house right after dinner, saying he was going to study. And then I ran into my friend Sari on the subway last week. She asked how Jacob was, and said her husband Isaac never saw him at shul anymore. She said we must be busy getting ready for the baby.”
She took a deep breath before continuing. “I asked him about it after Shabbos. He didn’t say anything at first. He just sat there, looking guilty, stroking his stupid goatee, saying it was hard to explain. And then he said he was in love with her. That he had been in love with her for years. They had actually talked about getting married. And then, a little more than a year ago, he brought her home to meet his parents. They knew about her. They knew.”
I could hear the anger in her voice. “Of course, everything fell apart after that. He brought her to the house, and right in front of her, his father threatened to disown him. And then, right after that, the rabbi paid a visit to the family and came down on him like a ton of bricks. Everyone got involved. They made him promise to give her up. But he didn’t.”
I didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She wiped her eyes again. “The rabbi and his family rushed him to the matchmaker. They said they wanted to get him married immediately. Everyone convinced him it was the right thing to do. He should settle down with a nice girl, an Orthodox girl, and live the life he was supposed to live. No more lies. No more deception. Except of course, for the lies they told me and my family. That I was exactly what he was looking for. And this was the kind of marriage he wanted.”
The door to the conference room suddenly opened. “Oh, sorry,” a voice said, and the door closed again. We sat for a few moments in silence.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Aviva said. “After I spoke to the rabbi, he said that he’d be willing to talk to Jacob again, and ask him to stop seeing her. He said he would encourage Jacob to find another job, to lessen the contact they have because of working together. But beyond that, there was nothing that he could do. And for the sake of our baby, we had to find a way to work things out.”
“Is he willing to work with you,” I chose my words carefully, “you know, in terms of some sort of counseling?”
She nodded. “But I don’t know that it’s going to change anything. I don’t know if he’ll want to give her up now, any more than he wanted to then. He said she knows about the baby, and it doesn’t bother her that he’s married. He said she understands he had to marry a Jewish girl, and that he’s expected to have a family with me. In fact, she was at our wedding, sitting with the other women from his office.”
I could feel my eyes widening in shock, and she nodded. “Oh yes, apparently, somewhere mixed in with those four hundred people who came to celebrate our simcha was my husband’s whore.”
In all of the years that we had worked together, I couldn’t remember ever hearing her say anything unkind or derogatory about anyone, and the fact that she would use such a word showed me just how distraught she was.
“And, as I’m sure you’re aware, according to the terms of our ketubah, our marriage contract,” she said bitterly, “only Jacob can decide whether or not we can get divorced.”
I looked at her, horrified. Before I could speak again, she put up a hand to silence me. “The rabbi was very clear about that. If Jacob wants to give me a get, then he can. But if he wants to stay married, we stay married. And besides, with the baby on the way, I don’t have a lot of options.”
“You can stay with us,” I said, the words coming automatically. “You know that, no matter what.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Jill, you know I can’t do that. If I left him, I could never go back. I’d be ostracized, a runaway wife. Even my parents said so. The other morning, when you came in early, I was on the phone with them. I told my father I was suspicious, that I thought something was going on. I asked him if I found out that Jacob was being unfaithful, could I come back home. But he told me no, I was a married woman now, my place was with my husband.
“He told me I was a wife now, and I could never be a daughter again. He said it made him angry, angry enough for him to want me to come home, but he knew it would be wrong. Then my mother got on the phone and told me I had to turn a blind eye, that if I wanted to keep my home, my marriage, my place in the community,” she seemed to almost spit the last word from her mouth, “I would ignore it, if there was anything to ignore.
“And now, it might not even remain a secret. Now that I know about this woman he doesn’t have to pretend with me anymore, and he can do whatever he wants, just so long as he’s discreet, and he doesn’t flaunt it they way he did before we were married. And everyone else in our families is willing – happy, even – to pretend it isn’t happening. And they think I should pretend it isn’t happening, either. Because it looks right from the outside. We have a proper Jewish home, he has a proper Jewish wife, we’re about to have a child, and the community has total control of our lives.
“And Jacob has total control over our marriage. There’s even a word for women like me – agunot –the anchored ones. And worst of all, if I were to leave him now, my baby,” she seemed to choke on the word, “my baby could never marry anyone within the community, because the child of a runaway wife would never be accepted.”
Awkwardly, I patted her arm, and the gesture felt totally inadequate. Like Aviva, I felt powerless. I knew there was nothing I could do or say to help her fight against the injustice that had been committed against her, all in the name of love.
But perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t really about love. Aviva was not a modern young woman. She had probably been in love with Jacob, the way that my friends and I had been in love dozens of times with guys that we dated. But even if she hadn’t been pregnant, there was too much at stak
e – the least of which was love. And even if she didn’t love him anymore, I knew she couldn’t throw off the relationship, even if it was only a year old, the way that my friends and I could.
She had married Jacob, she had staked her life on a system of laws and traditions that had ensured her community’s survival for generations, and all at once, in her trusting eyes, I saw why. She would probably never have the courage to walk away from the life and the laws of the Orthodox community that had defined her since birth. And no matter how liberating I thought it would be for her, I knew that if she woke up tomorrow morning in my life, she’d be lost.
“Anyway,” she sighed, “I wanted to tell you what was going on, since you’ll probably be hearing pieces of these conversations for the next couple of weeks. But I’ll try not to fight with him on the phone when you’re around.”
“No, no,” I soothed her. “Don’t worry about it. The only important thing is that you take care of yourself, especially now.”
“I know.” She took another tissue from the box and touched it to her eyes before she crumpled it into a ball in her hand. “But I’m scared. I’m so afraid that I’m going to go through all this alone.”
“You won’t be alone,” I reassured her. “Even if I have to learn Lamaze in the next ten days.”
A ghost of a smile brightened her face. “You’re a good friend.” She sighed again. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do. What will people say?”
“No one here will know, unless you say something to them.” I stood, and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll make sure you’re covered. If you need me to do anything, if you need to be out of the office, whatever, just let me know.”
She smiled gratefully as she gripped the arms of the chair and heaved herself to her feet. “I know. It’s not this group of people I’m worried about, though.”
I nodded. She walked ahead of me and opened the door. “I’m just going to the ladies’ room, okay? I want to wash my face, try to put myself back together. And then I need to find some time to talk to Larry about my maternity leave. So I’ll probably be upstairs, in case anyone is looking for me.”
“Whatever you need,” I told her, and I watched her make her way down the hall. I knew it would be a while before I could talk to her about what I had found in the manuscript, and I wondered, in light of what was happening in her life, if she’d even be interested in hearing about it.
Then I walked back to my desk. I sat down, unlocked and opened my desk drawer, and took out my purse. Inside my wallet was a small black and white picture that Michael and I had taken in one of those old fashioned photo booths on the boardwalk at the Jersey shore, on a bright autumn day not long after we had met.
In the photograph, we both wore ratty old sweatshirts and jeans. We sat in the tiny booth with our arms wrapped around one another. My hair was shorter then, only down to my chin, and my sunglasses were pushed up on to the top of my head. I was smiling at the camera. Michael’s hair was a riot of windblown curls, his eyes were crinkled at their corners, and he was laughing.
I looked at the picture, and then looked over the wall at Aviva’s cubicle, where the wedding portrait of her and Jacob held pride of place by her telephone. He stood with his arm firmly encircling her waist; her hand lay against his chest. Aviva had told me afterward that when the photographer posed them for the picture, it was the first time she and Jacob had ever touched one another. I looked at it for a long moment, and then I put my wallet away.
That afternoon, I found another typed envelope addressed to me in my office mailbox. Even before I reached my desk, I slit the top of it open with my thumbnail. Inside there were several sheets of paper, maybe seven or eight of them, folded into thirds. I looked at the pages as I walked slowly down the hall back to my office.
Unlike the other letters, there was no address or salutation, only the same inconsistently ink-patterned, typed words, seeming to pour out in a torrent on the pages.
In the winter of 1941, things began to change. We believed – foolishly - that we would be safe, because we were German citizens first, and Jews second, and that the true war – Austria’s war, Poland’s war — would not come to us. But suddenly we began to feel its cold hands reaching further into or lives. We knew, soon enough, that we were Jews. We discovered new things about being Jewish every single day. We learned how to swallow our tears when we saw the children lined up for school in their dark blue coats, with their yellow stars shining upon them like a tiny universe.
We learned how not to notice the German women who yelled the words “Filthy Jew” at us in the streets. We learned how to cover our noses and mouths to protect us from the smoke when the torches were put to our shops. And then soon, we learned how to be hungry. The merchants were forbidden to sell anything to us. It became more difficult every day to keep the family fed and clothed. Soon the Jewish children in our town were sent home from school and not allowed to return. One day the doctor and his family disappeared. Their door swung on a broken hinge, like a mouth trying to speak. The priest who had once been so cordial to us was now silent when we passed him in the streets. We heard whispers. But we did not want to believe them.
The morning came when all of the men in the town were taken. Aron read a story to Minna, and together we watched her fall asleep, and then when he came to our bed I fell asleep in his arms for the last time. He went to the square before dawn, long before I awakened. He never told me he knew he would be taken away that morning, but I am certain that he knew it was the last time he would ever say good night to me. Knowing how I loved him, he hid the truth from me.
I pushed open the door to our office. Aviva was nowhere to be found, but her sweater was still draped over the back of her chair, so I knew she had not left for the day.
I sat at my desk and looked at the paper again. Aron and Minna. I wrote the names on my notepad. Finally, I thought, some clues for the donor database. If I, or Aviva, or another curator had taken enough notes on this person’s past artifact donations, the information we had on file might be detailed enough. By looking up the names of family members, I might be able to figure out who sent the manuscript.
I opened up the database program, typed in the names and waited for the results. There was a flash of lettering on my screen:
296 ENTRIES FOUND
I paged through the names. Some of them were familiar. Becker, Dumas, Fairstein, Lilienthal, Sutton, Weingast. I clicked on the entry for one donor – Mimi Fairstein – whom I remembered visiting about two years ago:
FAIRSTEIN, MIMI: Wedding Ketubah, circa 1890, Vilna, Poland. Listed on document are donor’s grandparents’names: Aaron Kelberg and Minna Gratz.
No luck, I thought. Aron and Minna clearly had not been the writer’s grandparents. I sighed. I didn’t expect to find the source on my first try, but with 295 entries to go, I was going to need a little help with the research. The only question was who could I trust enough to ask.
I picked up the typewritten sheets and continued to read.
I was tired in those days, exhausted, underfed. That morning, I slept so deeply and never heard the trucks come into the square. I never heard the voices of the soldiers crying Sieg Heil, never heard the echo of the gunshots as they shot the men who refused to join the ranks. I never heard the exhaust of the engines as they drove away with our husbands and fathers and brothers like so many animals, crowded onto the transports. It was only later, when Aron did not return from work, that I found out he was gone.
Minna was only three, and she would ask me in her voice like a little silver bell, Where is Papa? Where did he go?
Some of the other mothers, knowing the men would never return, told their children that their fathers had gone to Heaven, to visit G-d. But I told my daughter the truth. I don’t know where Papa is, I said. But I am certain that he is not with G-d.
A few weeks later, on that spring morning, the transports came for us. People asked me, years later, if you knew they were coming, why did you not run away
? But we had heard the rumors for weeks, of other towns and villages where people had fled under the cover of night, only to be captured in the forest.
Before Aron was taken away, he had received letters from some who found hiding places in the homes of people they trusted. They sent letters written in code, in Yiddish, in French, in any language that would not betray their whereabouts, letters smuggled inside bills and lists and meaningless bits of newspaper. They came from those who had hidden in attics and under floors, in barns and byres and stables, and they told us how the ones who went to the square that morning were taken away in trucks, to labor in camps.
The others, the ones who were unfit for work, or religious, or rebellious, or simply because of a whim, were taken to the forest and lined up and shot, one by one, the men, the women and the little children. And then their bodies were desecrated by lime and acid, left to rot, sometimes buried, sometimes left exposed, naked and dead in the burial pits, for all to see as a warning. These were Jews, the letters whispered. This is what will happen to you if you are a Jew.
Sometimes I would awaken in the night, thinking I heard their cries, but it was my own child, crying for her father, from hunger, from fear. I would go to her, hold her hand and sing lullabies, but she would not be comforted. How could she? For I had nothing but my false bravery to give her.
Once Aron was taken I knew there was not much time. I knew that there were not many mornings left in which Minna and I could dwell in safety. But I did not know where to go.
After Aron left we moved back in with my parents. My mother loved being with her granddaughter during the daytime, but as soon as Minna’s voice disappeared up the stairs to her nursery each night, my mother’s eyes would fill with powerless tears, knowing our fate could be determined at any moment. It was only a matter of days before they came for us.
One morning, on the first hot day in a spring when there had been little rain, I woke early as I always did. My mother and daughter and sisters were not yet awake. But a hummingbird fluttered outside my window, and the summer breeze made the branches of the trees tap against the glass. The sunlight and blossom made me feel as if I still lived in the world that G-d had created for us. And I
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