The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  It was dark by the time the train rolled back into Sydney, the lights of the city twinkling like a fallen heaven – and all I wanted to do was get back to Miss du Maurier’s and see Lily. Would she still be there? I wondered if after our parting she might have returned to the home she had run away from. I had given her no assurances, events had struck me blind. I had clumsily told her I would give all up to my aunt and uncle’s wish to study overseas, as if it were not my choice at all. I had tried to tell her how I felt, tried to press her to see that she felt the same, but my speech was crippled. What did I have to offer her, after all? The affliction of the past? I would not be a curse to the girl I loved.

  The new moon was like a silver trout in the sky as I walked down L’Avenue, the dim streetlights humming. I was so tired; I hadn’t slept properly in days, the nights and days bleeding each into the other. I looked over to Miss du Maurier’s house, the shadows from the fig trees spreading over it like wings. Only the light in Mr Little’s window burned beneath the veil of the curtains, a strange light, not electric but the shimmering movement of candle flame.

  Lily’s window was dark against me. I turned the furry collar of my coat up around my ears. The chill of the valley still seemed to cling to me, though the wind was barely a puff. Beauty flapped from one fig tree to the next, before plummeting to a mound of sticky leaves piled up in the gutter. She pulled out a grub quicker than a blink and gulped it down into her throat, then flew up into the branches, sending a startled fruit bat flapping away.

  Not wanting to creep like a thief up the stairs and startle my aunt, I knocked on the door like a visitor. My knocks echoed down the silent street. Aunt Hephzibah opened the door, her startled face asking a hundred questions without a word. She barely registered the sight of Beauty upon my shoulder, and I coaxed the raven to hop down onto the gate, knowing she would wait. My aunt led the way up the stairs to the kitchen and did not ask me anything, not a syllable, but filled the samovar with water and tea and waited for the brew to begin.

  The kitchen was warm, the stove was still pulsing out its heat; the samovar steamed, and only then did my muscles begin to ache and the room recede as I felt my eyelids close. The key from the broken tefillin was still in my pocket, seeming to burn hot through my clothes and onto my skin. My aunt sat with her hands in her lap, composing herself. I wanted to speak, but she had bowed her head: her lips moved quietly, a prayer. I could not wait until she was done; the last of words of her prayer and my voice come out together.

  ‘He’s alive, Aunt Hephzibah. He is at the hospital up in the mountains. You can go to him. The first train is in a couple of hours. He’s suffering exhaustion, but otherwise he’s unharmed.’ Whatever had been banking up her tears was now gone: they ran unhindered, her shoulders trembling with relief.

  ‘G_d heard our prayers. What did your uncle say?’ she said, wiping her face. What could I tell her, where could I begin? I was still trying to make sense of it myself. If was as though pages of his life and the Torah had become interwoven, as if the loose pages had been mismatched by a careless bookbinder’s hands.

  ‘He spoke of many things. And of my mother and Isaiah.’ At hearing this name a fresh flood of tears found their way down the already wet tracks on her face. She was racked with a deep sadness.

  ‘There is also this,’ I said as I pulled out the key, heavy in my palm.

  My aunt stared at it for a moment, speechless until she sighed deeply and stood up from the table, beckoning for me to follow.

  ‘I put the key in the tefillin that Isaiah, my brother, made. He’d sent it to your uncle as a gift, to show him his skill. Isaiah was training to be a sofer, a ritual scribe. I knew your uncle had consigned it to the attic, having an inkling that his kishef macher, his magic-maker sister, had made an unwelcome addition with her amulets, rendering it invalid. Your Uncle Israel could not destroy it, as it was still filled with HaShem’s words, so he consigned it to the attic to await its burial with the rest of the old mezuzah’s scrolls and broken prayer books. I could see no harm in making my own contribution, nor putting it in with your things. It was a little bit of your mother and father joined together, a lot like you.’

  She led me to the hallway and stopped beneath the hatch in the ceiling. Together we pulled the attic ladder down and she held it steady as my feet trod those rungs again.

  ‘The suitcase, my hartse, you know the one.’

  A square of light shot up into the darkness from the passage below, where my aunt waited. The suitcase was coated in dust like fur. I took it and backed my way down, the dust falling away with a sweep of my hand.

  Carefully I carried it and placed it on the kitchen table between the still-steaming cups. The key was in my hand; it slid into the lock and the lid sprung free, but I didn’t lift the lid. I had too many questions; the contents of the suitcase would only evoke more, until the room was crowded with them, like the ark teeming with animals. What could be in there? A willy-willy of hope rushed through my chest, loomed up in the child in me, that my mother would spring out, just as Bess had done out of Houdini’s trunk, restored, returned, whole.

  ‘At our wedding, I could see that Isaiah was enamoured of your mother. The only one who didn’t seem to notice it was Israel. Your mother had helped me to put a sparrow’s egg between my chest and dress as I walked up to the chuppah, a blessing of the children to come. She didn’t know that it would be her firstborn she would bless me with. Isaiah had come back from his studies for the wedding, but Israel could only ever see Isaiah as his competitor and Zipporah as the little girl who was always sticking her nose into books that were not hers to peek into. He did not want to see how their faces grew rosy each time their eyes met, when the men danced in the men’s circle and the women in theirs.

  ‘Isaiah went back to his yeshiva to finish his studies, Zipporah went back home with her mother, and we left to come to Australia. When we arrived, a letter already waited for us from Isaiah declaring his intention to marry Zipporah. But Israel was against the match.’

  ‘But why would he do that to his own sister, to his friend?’

  ‘He felt Isaiah should have married a more traditional girl. He did not want Isaiah to be tainted. He knew Zipporah wouldn’t put her ‘arcane nonsense’ behind her. Isaiah of course was angry, who could blame him. He expected your uncle to be happy for them. He loved your mother; he took no issue with her learning, with her being a kishef macher. For what were her amulets made of but the same holy words?

  ‘A letter came from Zipporah, which your uncle couldn’t bear to read. He started reading it out to me, but as the words progressed he stopped and the letter fell from his fingers. That was the last time either of their names was spoken in this house, it was as though we became only children then, our siblings’ names forbidden. Israel took out his scissors and cut the letter into pieces and sealed himself up in his study.’

  ‘What did it say?’ I could feel the air change; the contents of the suitcase seemed to pulse beneath my hand and I felt my chest constrict.

  ‘Painstakingly I pieced Zipporah’s letter together in secret, and sentence by sentence I read the news your uncle wouldn’t tell me. Isaiah was dead,’ Aunt Hephzibah said, the words tangled with her tears, ‘and Zipporah was pregnant and unmarried. He had gone to find a position in a town a week’s journey away. She had begged him to take an egg, an amulet that she had inscribed with the first words of Genesis, but he would not take it, no matter how she pleaded with him. She hadn’t told him of the life she carried within her; she was waiting until he had the good news that he had a position, so his refusal of her amulet made her despair. You can read as much yourself, it is all in there. Any other letters that came I intercepted before he saw them, I kept them all.’ My aunt pointed at the suitcase. I rested my hand on the lid that been in the attic above my bed all along. My mother’s voice captured in print. Her thoughts my comfort. If I had only known.

  ‘What happened to my father?’ My voice was not my own, husk
y, stuck in my throat.

  ‘Isaiah was taken ill on his journey. Typhoid. His body came back to the village. Zipporah was pregnant and unmarried. She buried that egg by his graveside. He would take it with him then.’ My aunt gripped the table, her face twisting with her own grief, for the brother she had not been able to mention for too long, the brother she had never been allowed to mourn. My father, who up to now had never been named, who’d been more mysterious than the Master Mystifier. How could I have lived my whole life so far without knowing anything about him? It pained me.

  ‘What was he like, Aunt Hephzibah?’

  Tears welled in her eyes then as he came vividly to her memory. ‘He was tall like you, gangly even. He had smiling eyes and a soft heart, much like you, my darling boy,’ she said, her familiar hand soft on my cheek.

  ‘What is my name then? Isaiah’s last name, your name before you were married?’ Ari bar Isaiah, Ari son of Isaiah, Ari Pearl. Ari Who? Not Houdini, as I had dreamed as a boy, that I knew.

  My aunt looked up at me, her hand wrapped around the curve of the cup, just for something to hold on to, for her tea had long since gone cold. ‘Silver.’

  Ari Silver. Ari Pearl. Ari Silver.

  ‘All that you need to know is in here.’

  My aunt opened the suitcase and the lid flipped back with a thunk upon the table-top. Inside, on the top of the suitcase, was a layer of little baby clothes, a little knitted bonnet, a pair of booties, a little blanket. The clothes for the longed-for child of my aunt’s that never came. She carefully lifted them out and underneath was something familiar – the little coat I had worn tight around me as I had run that night with my mother. As she pulled it back, beneath it, I saw a bundle of letters, messages that my aunt had intercepted, kept from my uncle’s eyes. Had she had snatched them from the postman’s satchel before he could even put them in the letterbox? She’d kept so many things safe – the key, the tefillin, the bundle of letters. My aunt had saved my history from my uncle’s scissors, just as my mother had saved my life.

  My Aunt Hephzibah took my hand in her own and gave me a page stiff with tape, for my uncle’s scissors had raged and done their worst after all: words not cut with his usual precision, but massacred, turned to ribbons. Aunt Hephzibah had patiently pieced together the scraps to form a whole, a gift through time, for me. My mother’s voice shone through, my head rang with her words. Carefully I handed the letter back to my aunt and she put it back, safe in the archive, the tale of my mother.

  ‘Your mother marked you to keep you safe. This tattoo on your hand is a living amulet, one that could never be lost or forgotten. Who is Israel to say it is superstition? They killed children in Kishinev, you know. But you came to us out of such a nightmare, all that way, unharmed. It was a miracle.’

  I could not bear to meet her gaze; the gravity of what she said haunted me. My mother had saved me by sacrificing herself and her own mother. I felt the weight of my own life, her precious burden. She had read the signs, heard the danger coming, she knew the risk. She had flown me through the streets to the only safety that remained to her.

  My aunt flicked through the yellowing pages, and I looked at my mother’s handwriting, familiar and strange on paper rather than skin, thousands of dark strokes, links in a delicate chain between us.

  My aunt’s fingers rested on an envelope, she slid out a letter, thumbed through the pages and handed them to me.

  He was born at the rising of the morning star. The first thing he did was not cry but yawn, his tongue darting like a pink bee in the lip of a flower, a yawn as wide as a lion’s. I have called him Ari. I thought of calling him Ariel – a lion of G_d – but I have called him Ari – lion, just for himself, to be beholden to no one.

  The words set a hot pulse in me. I could hear what she meant, a lion for myself. I had felt this sense quicken upon the mountain. My promised land was waiting. My mother’s words were a map, my way forward. She had saved my life so I could live it, not to be as a memorial, as stone.

  I have placed a mark upon his hand. I know it would enrage Israel if he was here, but we are already beyond the pale, he and I. We may as well make the best of it – what protection do any of us ever have but from HaShem and our own wits, deeds and words? Sometimes I think the whole world can be reduced to a word – in Genesis HaShem spoke and it was so. I know Isaiah would understand.

  I could feel something writhe beneath my skin, an ever-so-slight palpitation in my chest. Inky butterfly wings danced over the page. My breath came in short, sharp bursts as I took in the words.

  So I have marked his hand with the word Abracadabra, down the middle of his left hand, a word enough to guide him and not be lost or forgotten, just as the Shekinah can rest on us lightly like a breath yet have the power of the wind. Abracadabra from the Aramaic, avara kehdabra: I will create as I speak. Or the Hebrew abreq ad habra: Hurl your thunderbolt even unto death. The root of the three Hebrew words ab for Father, ben for son, ruach acadosch for Holy Spirit. Abracadabra. I will create as I speak.

  All along I had had the key to my own life, inscribed on my hand. The gaps between the dark letters looked like the teeth of one of Houdini’s skeleton keys, the ones he would carry in his hair, or curled under the sole of his foot. Yet I had had the means to set myself free all this time and had not known it.

  ‘But who were the family that sheltered me, kept me safe?’ Their faces blurred fleetingly through my mind and I recalled that picture on the wall, a mother and a child.

  My aunt hesitated but she couldn’t withhold anything more from me. ‘That woman was the one who helped you into the world, my child, the only midwife that would attend when they turned their backs against your mother.’

  My head was heavy in my hands. Her bravery sat in my chest singing. Zipporah. Zipporah. Zipporah. My mother named for a bird.

  The clock chimed out in the hallway, it was only an hour before dawn and the first train. There would be time enough to read through my history in those letters later.

  Abracadabra. I will create as I speak.

  I turned to my aunt. ‘The Birdman has agreed to meet you at the station. I’ll come when I can.’

  ‘The Birdman? Who is he?’

  ‘The man Uncle Israel owes his life to. You can’t fail to find him. He whistles like his namesake. I’ll come when I can. There is someone I need to see.’

  ‘It’s that girl, isn’t it?’ I nodded and she stared at me for a time, trying to suppress her feelings, until they burst out of her. ‘But Ari, she is a gentile.’

  ‘I’ll not give her up.’ And I wouldn’t, I was my own man, beholden to no one, no man, no rules, no religion. I knew that now. My mother’s letters had given me my namesake’s courage. I would not deny it now. My aunt nodded reluctantly.

  She gathered a set of fresh clothes for my uncle, and his tzitzit fringes, his yarmulke, his second-best tallit shawl and his own amulets, for without them he would feel naked as I would without the mark upon my hand. My aunt handed the little coat to me. I had remembered it to be heavy when I was a child, but in my grown hand it felt just as weighty. As she embraced me I felt her whisper, hurried and warm, in my ear.

  ‘Your grandmother lined the hem of your coat with coins. She’s helping you even now.’ She kissed both my cheeks, her own face damp, and was gone. I felt the raised shapes in the hem, tested the weight of them in my palm, and felt their gravity. My grandmother had provided me with a small inheritance, enough to build a new life with the one I loved.

  I create as I speak.

  I would go and find her now, not a moment to lose. I closed the door securely behind me and surveyed the street. A bitter wind hummed along the telephone wires, but I was warm. The Birdman’s rag and taggle coat still covered my arms, and now the letters on my hand seemed to pulsate, radiant with their own heat. The last of the night’s stars gleamed at me, one brighter than all the rest. The trees made a great rushing sound as if the sky were a great river. I felt goose bumps dance over my skin
as if I was shedding something I no longer needed, like a chrysalis. Was that Beauty flapping above me? No, it was just the gathering ferocity of the wind.

  Something whistled past my head, and before I could register it, I found I could not move. My coat was riveted to the door. I was pinned fast, then I was struck, a blinding pain across my jaw, and struck again, and then all was dark.

  Slowly I grew aware of the pinch of my scalp as a blade scraped my hair away, the curve of the knife dragging across my skull, the cut and the sting of blood. The blow had made a bell ring in my head, my limbs tingle. When I came to, I was slumped against the door, but from beneath my eyelashes I watched, measuring my moment. Mr Little’s face loomed over me, barber-close, his teeth digging into his bottom lip. A look of rapture. If he planned to kill me, the coward, why hadn’t the blade already done its work?

  I create as I speak. I didn’t have to be a remnant of the past, the result of others’ mistakes, a lost thread. I could begin anew. I create as I think. I steadied myself, opened my eyes and did not look away. I would not let another’s will reduce me to dust.

  My rage roared up in me then. All I had lost would not be in vain, I would not run, I would not be cowed by another’s violence. If blood would be shed, it would not be mine. Then, with all I had, I lashed out at him, sending him reeling into the street. His knife rippled like mercury between us but I stood resolute. I reached up and yanked the blade from the door. I would not be swayed from what I had found. My roots were here, and here they would grow.

  With a swift kick the knife on the ground was concealed in the gutter. Stepping closer to him, with the blade from the door in my hand, I approached him, letting the handle twirl and spin between my fingers. And then, with a conjuror’s art, I made the knife vanish out of my hand into nowhere. I had no need of a coward’s blade. I stood only a moment longer, seeing the desire for blood twist into panic. I struck him once more, my fist meeting his temple. He would not follow me now. It was done.