by Edie Meidav
When the Christian girl knocked at the door, I hesitated before opening. Once I did, she did not so much as look me up and down as take me in. Well, she breathed, and in that she avoided the usual formulas of politeness, her exhale describing a world. Which she followed, this sweet-faced girl with her light brown hair and a bad scratch down her cheek, her hands bruised, with something even more astonishing: Well, Henryk?—she knew my name, a flabbergasting fact. I am so glad to see you, she said. Is your mother in?
With her strange access to memory or background, I found it even odder that all of the house also knew her, that she would be offered a chair at our fancy table, my mother pouring her a glass cup of cherry tea, and there we had what we’d never seen before, this gentile eating from our best glass plates and cups.
She was something I did not understand at first, a wet nurse both now and in the past, for the two eldest brothers, that strangeness I found acceptable, the two of them always off in their own adventures, but apparently she’d also been this wet-nurse thing for me: I had drunk milk from a girl who looked too young. Plus I could not understand how had she gotten to have milk in her breasts and my mother none?
I stared at her throat and no lower, another mystery, but when she felt my eyes, we both blushed and turned away. Was she actually a great deal older? In my mother’s voice I heard a softness she rarely had a chance to show around three boys whom she had to spend so much time scolding.
Given my mother’s propensities, I see now, she would have been happier to have had girls whom she might have tutored in French, teaching them to sew buttons or crochet, rather than having to scold three boys forever late for cheder.
That said, it is probable that I was, as my brothers accuse me, her favorite, I the one to whom my mother told a little story when I was sick about three fish swimming through a sea, or to whom she sang lullabies, our home language gargling in the back of her throat like the swish of gills, my bird-fish mother who may have liked me most, since part of my bed-warming duty meant it was always hers I warmed last so that if I fell asleep in my duties, she cradled me in her arms, bony but strong, carrying me gently down to the bed I shared with my brothers. On special nights she let me stay till dawn so that I awoke in tetchy dreams, light muted, finding my mother with her tight bun undone and my feet not affixed to my body until I understood the time had come for me to pad off downstairs.
The Christian girl also had known an enforced time away, that much was clear, and like me she knew how to come back. I tried telling her this once but she didn’t understand. I was merely to swallow the new fact of her coexistence with us. We did not have much room but two of the upstairs aunts doubled up so the Christian girl got her own room, rousing some pantry grumbling. Yet we were all to be kind because she had been a help to my mother when she had gone through a difficult time, while the Christian girl had gone through her own hard time, and then all evaporated into a hush, leaving me unclear: Who among us three boys had been difficult enough to cause such hush? Was it the eldest, mostly kind but lacking the decisiveness our mother admired in my father? Was it our middle brother, a great idealist who always fought against my father regarding principles of justice, whether or not we should go to school six days a week or get to ride out with him to his forest? Or was I the one, known for my furtive ways?
My father especially treated the Christian girl kindly. He made clear he did not like hearing my mother give her chores around the house: asking her to lug in kindling, for one, chief among the many tasks my mother hated, much preferring to be upstairs reading one of her books in French or German. Stoking the woodstove meant bringing the mess of my father’s business into the house, given the pride he had in his timber’s quality and his appreciative inhale when smoke filled the living room. The same fumes made my mother cough. And yet bringing in the wood became the Christian girl’s first task. My father cautioned my mother: Give her time, he said, let it go slowly. So much I did not understand, though once I thought I almost understood her snub nose and rounded features by looking into the mirror on a silver brush my mother kept on the dark chest in her room, a softened triangular mirror in which I found the same downward sloped eyes, blue over the same rounding of lips, but then thought as ever I was fooling myself.
The day some of whatever balance we had was upset came in the spring, after the holiday we disparaged by calling Kretzmacht which might have actually been Easter. Calling any holiday by such a name was like insulting someone as a pig in the manner of my educated mother, who, when upset about someone barring my father, always exploded in German: Schwein!
Those first months of the girl among us, whenever my mother’s voice grew harsh as she could not help flying into a rage at disorder, going around the house whisking after all the female relatives, the ones she called useless, the ones whom my mother’s bitter whispers called freeloaders on the hard work of our father and mother both, I liked to imagine I was no child of hers but rather risen from the soft belly of the Christian girl.
We had been told to call her by the familiar name Kir, fitting with the curved mouth and round pink shoulders as well as the cherry tea my mother offered that first day. Once outside near the woodpile I saw the girl fastening hair up in the late afternoon, bright like fire, and horror caught my throat because no way could I leave off staring at her, though I also lacked all excuse if someone caught me in the act. Anyone would tease me mercilessly. This was how we brothers teased, light at first and then narrowed inevitably toward my clumsiness, a long trail of broken china and glass cups behind me, and despite it, sometimes alone among the boys I was pressed into service, going to the market with both my mother and the Christian girl though, increasingly, my mother failed to go, and there we would be, the Christian girl and I in the market, fingering items, between us sharing an understanding with no wheedling needed, a pair like all the others around us, two men with arms swinging in gentle rhythm together, arguing with the same concert of gesticulation, two trees leaning toward each other, the rattle of horses bearing their sawdust scent, and for me the Christian girl stayed a spot of grace and bringer of good things beyond just the tart apples she slipped from a tree only she knew about. She had a way of taking me in. No one else bothered trying since I was youngest and lesser in everything, at cheder especially, only like my mother in that I was good with languages, the one asking questions but always failing to do the kind of brilliant thing our middle brother did, what came easily to him, able to put together two concepts the teacher had introduced. Our eldest brother liked school less than machines, liking to watch a special blade our father had in his factory go round: When I’m older, he said, I’m going to have a factory that makes machines like this, but we laughed since he was clearly going to be a rabbi, the job our family cut out for eldest sons, as my mother had explained, a line going back epochs, only interrupted by the giant lowering force in the sky that sometimes pointed our way and which I could sometimes see, a needle like a cloud compass slanted over the spires toward our home. Then too my throat would tighten. Mostly the adults spared children the stories but their attempts were feeble: you always ended up knowing more than you wanted about this one being killed or that one being burnt out of his house, a knowledge round the rim of things. Others also saw the needle, even those who moved in among us who had heard that in our town of spires the gentiles let you be despite the firebrands elsewhere. What they told us of elsewhere we pocketed, information kept among other keepsakes, though my father kept having difficulty with one man, not just jealous but with some power in town since he was friends with the alderman intent on cutting up one section of forest, but our father’s work lived in a world apart from our sellers and our baker, a woman with a great heart-shaped face and a warm salute for any one of our family, helping place us securely. No one had to fear, the needle slanted elsewhere, we were made of rituals as ungiving as my father’s lunchtime borscht.
On most days my father returned home to eat borscht the Christian girl prepared the way he
liked, an island of cream floating in its center, at its crown a sprig of dill from the small patch I got to tend alongside our house. Before the Christian girl came, the borscht was the rare technique my parents had to show whatever affinity might have brought them together, whatever craze induced them to stand like stiff-necked marionettes in their wedding daguerreotype, grand and unreachable. Until the advent of the Christian girl, the ritual stayed part of the mystery that went with my mother’s buttons, but afterward, my mother retreated from her lunchtime service, no longer sitting with him to discuss the house and children, the timber or the nearby tenant farmers who resented my father’s holdings. Instead my mother stayed upstairs reading in the room she had to herself, while the Christian girl served him borscht and then retreated.
On such a day and moment, I watched the girl, knowing both father and mother occupied themselves with staying apart, while for me the girl was the axis and entirety of what mattered in the paschal light of an unseasonably warm spring, everyone said as much, how early the warmth had come, until a disruption came from our front yard, someone pushing open the sturdy gate made with the best timber, coming in to whack the ground with a strange tool, mallet on one end, axe on the other.
So surprised, I slipped fully on the hill and came down, landing on my rear not far from where the Christian girl bathed, her eyes peeking at me above the slats. Henryk! she let out. From the front of the house came commotion and yelling, the girl pulled a cloth around her bare shoulders and from different corners we entered the front yard to face the intruder, a young man swearing in a Polish so foul and thick I understood only a few words before he did the strangest thing, lunging forward to grab our girl.
From the house, from his solitary borscht, my father emerged and with a speed that astonished me took in what was happening and moreover knew what to do: he lit immediately upon the boy wielding his axe-mallet so that he dropped the Christian girl’s wrist. My father’s usually watery eyes were pure steel, asking in clipped Polish what the boy meant by this display and with his head indicated the girl should retreat, he would handle the situation. What followed was a long series of rebukes of which I could only make out part, pretending to fix my eyes on the mottled birch, my favorite tree in our front yard on which I had spent many hours climbing to read a book, the act uniting the faraway worlds of my parents.
The young man kept on and yet my father managed to back him out of the gate which he then bolted. From the front door the Christian girl, still only half-covered, called to us.
Don’t worry over such foolishness, my father said before shockingly coming to her and, with the back of his hand, the slightest of gestures, caressing the round cheek with more closeness I had ever seen him show my mother. It will be fine, don’t worry. From the upstairs window where apparently my mother had watched everything as well came her voice, a high whistle caught in it: You see what I said?
This was not the last of the troubles coming from the Christian girl. It was already the full blast of summer, we boys no longer needing long pants, behind us that terrible spring sabbath when untimely snowfall induced us to avoid temple to instead sled down a hill on a piece of wood one of our father’s friends had given us, only to mistakenly skid past the window in which my father prayed with other men, foreheads and upper arms binding them to a place it seemed impossible for us to reach, where we should have been, what was meant as destiny. Our father knew everything. Especially that we were capable of great sin: on the sled I sat in the middle, the eldest behind, the middle in front, and our father looked up and caught of all eyes only mine, his belt later the hardest on my backside.
All that history happily lost to snowmelt. In the summer everyone grew kinder, even my mother who nonetheless, ever since the incident with the boy and the Christian girl’s shoulders, became colder around the house, her entries into rooms less swish and more glacial whiff, something that made you feel how bitterly impossible was the compensation for some initial cost. She had a good head for figures, my mother, another trait which those around her, the aunts living off her, praised, and yet this talent for figures meant she often could not help speaking the language of accounts. I’d hear her tell my father with his watery gentleness that he had incurred an unrepayable debt given his stepping forth to protect the Christian girl, bare-shouldered. My brothers took in none of this. Only I was cursed with memory, as if I’d be forever alone in watching the dancing news of gazes.
The second time, the boy came to our gate wielding no mallet, his hair oiled into a strange part and with his peasant parents, the mother in a belted dress and worn shoes, face identical to those dried apple dolls I saw at the outskirts of market, sold by a man in a red cap whose arms were strangely short, just as the boy’s father’s arms were, making them all of a piece as I sat there openly gaping from our birch.
This apple doll family came to yell and gesticulate and make meaningful glances toward their boy who this time stood silent, hands opening and closing as if he were pumping air into himself, as if he tried to stay afloat in the presence of parents who kept on with their weathered hands punching the air and then, most surprisingly, they pointed at where I sat stilled in the crook, where I ate an apple while pretending to read one of the picture books my mother loaned me from her childhood. And then the question seemed to involve something with my pulling down my short trousers. But most horribly, this marked the one time in my life my father apologized: something grave could be happening. He took me with the other man to the back where brooms, mops, and axes were kept, and there I did not understand what was expected.
Pull them down—my father said, the soul of gentleness after a minute in which it was clear that I didn’t know.
And there they looked, the man reaching out with great crudity I still cannot fathom, taking my small bit to turn and examine it until to my horror it did its little trick. In the corner of our yard, a dog which had followed the family choked down what might have been the remains of a dead bird, looking around guiltily as if someone would come for it. I was nowhere I could imagine as the man did his work, unable to reach my father’s gaze, given his stature, so instead watched the dog gulping down its food. The argument seemed to do with whether or not I had been nursed by the Christian girl and somehow this matter could be resolved by looking in my trousers. So went the way of the adult world, nothing I could master, not like the grammatical word families we tried mastering at cheder.
Apparently whatever I had done or not satisfied the unhappy family or satisfied them enough that all of them went on their way, my father pressing some meaningful coins wrapped in a handkerchief into their hands, the timber of the door creaking shut behind them. Afterward, my mother and father exchanged a look which I could not understand.
You need to get that gate fixed, she said.
But when the firebrand people wanted to come in the real Christmas of that year for my family, when all of us would need to leave, the people who first gave us the message were those of this same apple doll family, and so we made our way out, only the Christian girl on the hill with her goodbye an unchanging glance as we left before dusk, in my mother’s market sack only the copper box with the story of all of us. We could take nothing but what we were wearing, seven layers of clothes on each, so that even my tall mother became as round as the Christian girl. And because my father believed the apple dolls, we survived, and because they didn’t, all the rest of my family, our stubborn aunts and cousins and friends, those who lived with us and those who did not, those who worked for my father or nearby, all of them stayed so that they might be killed and because of this I gained strange faith in the power of all that my trousers dropped had been able to do for our family in getting us spared to leave and does it really matter for how long I remained such a dreamer?
CODA
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL
Is it better to have stayed here and thought of there, Elizabeth Bishop asks, in her 1956 poem. Take Barcelona, ever so pleasing Barcelona. Or don’t take it, not q
uite yet. I am still holding onto Barcelona as a possibility, because to let go of Barcelona would mean a kind of death.
On my first visit, just out of high school on a bohemian budget ramble through France with a mostly best friend, an unlimited rail-pass trip during which we slept under rowboats and had mussels at fishermen’s bungalows, the city was just a train station to pass through in the soundtrack of the new pulsing self, so blind were we, seated on the ground at the Barcelona train station, picking at a stale baguette, so wrapped up in the adventure of being together, seventeen-year-olds abroad, counting coins while talking to random Scots who might as well have worn feathered hunting costumes. Using fantasies about the moment so musical they blocked most reality and even our fantasy of the one to come, we believed we had deciphered the world. My francophone friend made only a small allowance for Spain, because she liked the diffident heroine of The Sun Also Rises, so we skirted into Pamplona the day the bulls ran and then fled.
A few years later, having received a grant leading me to Yeats in Sligo, hoping for some red before the green of that summer, I headed first to two cities in Spain: Granada and then Barcelona, and so my real entry to Barcelona involved holding a guitar a Granada gypsy’s family had sold me (another story).
Who knows what youth is really looking for? I clung to that particular determination which whispers, constantly, that adventure has an ultimate meaning, that travel works as an end and good in itself. Does later-life travel declare or undo the self in a similar way? Young travel certainly makes you feel the potential energy of who you might become, granting the gift of your wings unfolding to a fuller span so that you return to familiar ground a high flier, never the same.