by Rina Frank
But Niku was adamant—only Hebrew! So my mother, who never once went to an ulpan for learning Hebrew, and in any case was hard of hearing, spoke to Niku’s children in a mixture of a little Hebrew, a little Yiddish, and a little sign language. And they all understood her.
Of course, Rivkale, Itzik, and Yossi had been nurtured from birth on a love of Zion and were perfect Israelis. We townies from Haifa, from Wadi Salib, no less, envied them. We envied them first of all because they lived in a lovely house, with a garden and flowers and trees and a lawn; and most important, they had fruit trees—orange, lemon, plum, and loquat. They even had an orange press in the shed in the garden, which they used to squeeze fresh orange juice for us and supply us with vitamins. Altogether, the ability to pick as much as we wanted, to eat as much as we could until one night we twisted and turned with agonizing stomachache from stuffing ourselves on plums, made us feel we were in the Garden of Eden. And second, we envied them because in their home they spoke only Hebrew.
At night we slept in Yossi’s room. His parents opened out his steel bed, raised the bed beneath it, and joined the two. Sefi was first to grab the better side—the one next to the wall. Yossi slept on the other side—the one taken by people who get up early in the morning; at five thirty that hyperactive kid was already awake. I was stuck with the crack along the center of the bed, which was actually a gap measuring several centimeters across between the two beds, because of the significant difference in height. I didn’t sleep a wink all night because I was terribly embarrassed about sleeping with a boy, even though he was my cousin, and anyway, I was frightened of farting in the middle of the night and not being able to keep it quiet. All night I lay there like a statue, not breathing or turning over. Rather like porcupines making love—very, very carefully.
When we went to Rahamim’s grocery store in the morning to pick up a few things the grown-ups had forgotten to buy for the seder, I saw Yossi push a packet of candy and a bar of chocolate into his pocket. Rahamim asked Yossi what to jot down on his mom’s account, and Yossi told him just the things we’d been sent out to buy. “Are you sure that’s all?” Rahamim asked Yossi, and the little thief said that he was one hundred percent certain.
I snitched to Dad that I’d seen Yossi stealing stuff from Rahamim’s grocery store, and Dad said that he wasn’t a thief.
“Yes, he is,” I told my dad, “he stole candy and chocolate.”
Dad told me that even if Yossi thinks he’s stealing, Eva pays for everything later, because Rahamim also writes down everything he’s seen Yossi putting in his pocket, so as not to shame him.
That evening we wore our new white pleated skirts and I wore my new black patent leather shoes and my sister wore her red matte leather shoes. My sister wore the close-fitting blue top with the red buckle, which of course went beautifully with her shoes. I wore a brown top, and it didn’t match, even though I had black patent leather shoes that were supposed to go with everything.
We sat down ceremoniously at the perfectly laid table, as befits a traditional kosher family seder. Although Niku and Eva were secular and did not even fast on Yom Kippur, as my parents did, they never skipped so much as a single letter of the Passover Haggadah; we waited patiently for God to bring forth the Children of Israel out of Egypt with clenched fist and an outstretched arm.
I was waiting only for the afikoman and watched Niku’s every move to see where he was hiding it. I noticed nothing suspicious about him, and when the time came to look for the afikoman, we all spread out across the length and breadth of the room. My sister searched the sofa, Itzik moved all the cushions aside, Yossi searched in all possible cracks, and I made straight for the pile of records in the dresser. I flicked through all the Russian records that were there and that Eva loved to listen to because she had come from Russia. When I discovered a record in Hebrew, by Yaffa Yarkoni, I pulled it out of the pile and felt the lumpiness of the afikoman. Yes!!! I’d found the afikoman. Now I could ask for anything I could think of.
I wanted to ask for a bicycle. But I was embarrassed to, because I knew that it cost a lot of money, and anyway, with all those hills in Haifa, no one could ride a bicycle.
I wanted to ask for a football, but was embarrassed because I was a girl.
Most of all I wanted to ask for a blue top with a red buckle, but I knew that such tops exist only in America.
“What shall I ask for?” I whispered to my sister.
“Ask for a book,” my sister advised me quickly; “it makes the best impression.”
So, to defy my sister, who wanted a book for herself, I asked for a coloring book. “One for me and another for my sister,” I added.
My mother glowed with pride at this demonstration of sisterly love, never suspecting that I was only being contrary not asking for a reading book because this was what my sister wanted.
She awoke to see the religious woman nursing her baby. The girl had been named Rivka.
“Here’s Rivka for you to feed,” said the ward sister to the religious woman and attached a black-haired baby to her breast; which is how she knew that the religious woman’s baby was called Rivka.
Two days later, when she walked into the room they shared with two other women, she heard the religious woman refer to her behind her back as “that poor thing. She delivered a sick baby. Praise be to God that my own baby was born healthy.” She was nursing her Rivka and talking to two ultra-Orthodox women who were sitting on her bed. The three women fell silent as soon as they noticed her climbing onto her bed and turning her back on them.
She didn’t understand at first why she was being ignored, not having Noa brought to her to feed. When she saw the religious woman nursing Rivka for a third time, while she herself was still without a baby in her arms, she asked the sister about her Noa.
“Why aren’t you bringing Noa to me so I can feed her?” she asked; could it be construed as an eccentric request, to be allowed to feed the baby she had given birth to more than twenty-four hours earlier and whose perfect face she had never even seen?
“I don’t know,” the sister replied. “Ask the doctor,” she added, and walked out.
“Where’s my husband?” she shouted at the sister.
The sister poked her head in and pointed out that some new mothers were asleep, and would she please keep her voice down. “Your husband is waiting outside until Rivka has finished nursing.”
She fumbled for her slippers and went out in her pajamas to the hospital corridor. She hadn’t been able to find her robe and couldn’t remember where her husband had told her he’d placed it. It was freezing cold in the corridor, and she was shivering all over, although it could also have been out of fear.
He was waiting outside, unaware of the storm raging in her soul.
“Have you seen her?” she asked him immediately.
“I haven’t had a chance yet. They told me they’d talk to us soon.”
“What do they have to talk to us about?” she attacked him.
“I haven’t a clue. Isn’t it accepted procedure?”
“No. It isn’t accepted procedure,” she replied, as if, after giving birth for the first time in her life, she cared what was accepted procedure and what wasn’t. Besides, even in school she had never liked those people who were “accepted.” In fact, she quite loathed them, and everything that was “accepted” tended to raise her anxiety level.
“Let’s go and see her.” She dragged him, tottering in her slippers at a speed that would have graced a participant in the Tel Aviv marathon. They reached the nursery and asked a nurse where their daughter was.
After checking the baby’s name and that of her parents, the nurse went from bassinet to bassinet, only to return with the information that their baby was not there.
“Where is she, then?” she asked, her stomach doing an about-turn, feeling as if any second she would collapse right there.
“When did you give birth?” asked the pleasant nurse.
“Yesterday,” she replied
.
“And they haven’t brought her to you to nurse?”
“Yes, they brought her and I lost her,” she screeched in response. “Where on earth is my baby?”
The man supported her and asked if there was someone there qualified to tell them where their baby had disappeared.
“Maybe she’s in the Premature Babies Unit?” replied the nurse, who may have been raised at home on 1950s tales of kidnapped Yemenite babies and realized that something was not quite in order here. “Maybe she was born prematurely? Did you give birth early?”
“Is a birth weight of five and three-quarters pounds considered premature?” her husband asked.
“No,” said the nurse, “a little small, but certainly not a preemie.”
“Premature, preemie, where the hell is the Premature Babies Unit?” she asked.
“At the end of the corridor,” the nurse offered.
This time he was dragging her along quickly, her slippers slip-sliding relentlessly off her feet. They reached the end of the corridor and pulled up in front of a reinforced door with round windows, like a ship’s. The door was locked. They knocked on the door, and the ward sister, who was dressed in operating theater greens and had a surgical mask on her face, came out to them with a warm smile on her face. They introduced themselves, and the nurse immediately said she would call the department head. Dr. Mogilner, according to the identity badge on his white coat, a silver-haired doctor with a heavy South American accent, informed them that their baby was suffering from respiratory difficulties.
“What do you mean, respiratory difficulties?” They both caught their breath at the same time.
“The baby turns blue, and we are unable to find the reason for it,” the doctor said and led them gently into his office. He asked her about the pregnancy and if it had been normal.
“She was absolutely fine,” her husband said at once, as if to make it clear that she had made no problems and that he had been with her all the way.
She looked at him and said she wasn’t quite certain that the pregnancy was completely normal.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean I was under terrible stress because I had dragged you to Israel and I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to make it here and you’d have to give up a lot of the things you were used to, and maybe you wouldn’t find a job and then your back ached and I had to do a lot of the house moving myself, even though I was pregnant, and then your aunt died…” She spoke in a stream of words, as if spewing up the last few months clean out of her guts.
“But everything is all right now,” he said, as if telling her not to worry. “I am glad we made aliyah and that our daughter was born a sabra.”
“Can emotional stress affect the health of an unborn baby?” she asked Dr. Mogilner, who replied, “Absolutely.”
“And what about the delivery, was it normal?” the department head asked gently.
“I gave birth here, in this hospital. Don’t your records tell you anything about my delivery?” she asked. Maybe something had happened in the course of the delivery that she had been unaware of.
The doctor scrutinized the report in front of him and told them that the delivery had passed without any particular hitch.
“Would you like to see her?” he asked, and they both jumped out of their seats and followed him. They wanted to go in with him but were told that they would first have to wash their hands, put on a green gown that had to be tied at the back, cover their shoes with green covers that also had to be tied carefully, and of course tie a mask carefully over their faces, so as not to introduce a single germ into the preemie unit. When they first tried, they got confused with the back and front laces, but in time, over the three long months that their baby was hospitalized, they became very practiced and were always ready to enter the sterile room within seconds.
They looked down at her in wonder. Their baby was lying there like the most perfect angel they had ever seen in their lives. Every organ and every limb was in place; nothing was missing. She was naked.
“Isn’t she cold?” she asked the blue-eyed nurse, to whom she had immediately taken a liking, because she had gone straight to the incubator and turned Noa, so they could to see her in all her glory.
“No. She’s not cold.” Zohara smiled at her. She had noticed the nurse’s name tag on her green uniform. “The incubator is the warmest place in the hospital,” she reassured the concerned parents.
She remembered the weekly visit in eighth grade to the Kfar Galim agricultural school, for a whole day working in the fields. That year winter had been particularly cold and wet, and when the town kids were given the choice of jobs—they had, after all, volunteered; or more accurately, their services had been offered to the agricultural school—every one of them had chosen to work in the fruit harvest. As Haifa townies, they wanted to eat as much as they could off the trees. She asked their instructor if there were any other options.
He suggested work in the kitchen or harvesting potatoes, but she shook her head.
“Don’t you want to be with all your classmates in the fruit harvest?” The instructor appeared to despair of her.
“I see enough of them all week,” she said.
“I have an incubator full of chicks,” he told her.
“What would I have to do there?” She was instantly interested. On a cold wet winter’s day an incubator sounded good.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Just keep an eye on the chicks, make sure they don’t get cold.”
He took her into a kind of dwarfs’ hut, where she had to bend her head in order to get in and then could only either sit or lie on the straw that had been spread over the hard dry earth. It was nice in there. Not for nothing was the place called a hothouse for chicks, which scurried around tickling her feet, since she had immediately taken off her shoes. The place made her feel like Gulliver in the land of the little people, and she loved the sensation of all those chicks climbing over her body as if she was a sack of straw. She watched them for hours; at first they all appeared a uniform yellow, but she gradually learned to distinguish between them.
She identified the cock of the coop, the arrogant one, the pampered one, and the lazy one. When she noticed the runt, the one who didn’t know how to push his way to the food, she adopted him for herself and gave him a special portion of food, just for himself, so he’d grow big and strong. The next week she brought a book with her and read it out loud to her chicks, as if telling them a story. She took special care of the little runt she had adopted and made a point of feeding him before various other pushers-in could get to the food. According to the laws of nature, the weak survives only if it has someone to look out for it. Over six weeks, her chick grew to be like all his peers, and in the meantime the skies had cleared, and it had become too hot for her inside the hothouse. She told the instructor that she wanted to work in the groves, and she was able to bring home lots of freshly picked apples. Everyone was happy. Watching her beautiful baby lying naked in her incubator, she remembered that time at agricultural school and thought suddenly that the instructor must have devised this job especially for her so that she would learn how to take care of that weak little chick.
Noa opened her eyes wide.
“They are blue. Like your mother’s and your aunt Anna’s,” she said to her husband.
“The color can change,” another nurse said as she walked by them—as if what mattered to them was whether the baby’s eyes were going to change from blue to brown or to green or amber, and not the respiratory problems she suffered from, for which the doctors had no explanation.
August Disasters
A month later two very sad things happened to my sister, and she spent all her time crying. Dad was unable to console her, not even when he explained that disasters always happen in August, because that was the month in which the destruction of the Temple took place. Our dad wouldn’t even let us go to the beach on Tisha b’Av, because it’s a day on which a lot of people drown, even
though there were plenty of lifeguards around, because they weren’t on strike at that time.
My sister’s best friend Chaya, the most popular girl in the class, left Israel for America after her uncles who lived there had managed to persuade her parents that the future was much greener for the Jews in New York, and besides, it’s cheaper to give a doll as a gift without having to mail it to Israel and pay postage; and Hanna, my sister’s beloved homeroom teacher, was killed in a road accident.
The sudden and simultaneous loss of the two women she admired most was an unbearably heavy blow to my sister. Moreover, Chaya took with her all her dolls and the piano that my sister loved to run her fingers across the keys of. And for Hanna, who nurtured the neighborhood’s children even though she herself was from the Carmel, to suddenly disappear from her life was a terrible loss. Young people in those days got killed only in wars, not in anything as banal as road accidents.
In order to console her, Dad took us for a ride on the newly opened Carmelit light railway through all the stations from downtown Haifa and right up to the top of Mount Carmel.
Only after all four of us (yes, Dad agreed to take Mom, too) had watched to see that nothing bad happened to any of the other people did we muster the courage to step onto the escalator. It was then that my new shoe—one of the pair my parents had bought me for Passover—got caught in the escalator, and I watched it as it bounced over the stairs and was squashed on the other side. Brokenhearted, I cried for those stairs to stop moving so that I could go and rescue my shoe, but it was no good. The stairs continued to move, mangling to death one shoe of the first pair of new shoes I had ever owned.