What the Night Sings

by Vesper Stamper

  “How?”

  “Come home with me. We can be a family again. We don’t have to stay in Hannover; we can go wherever we want, find a good conservatory for you. It doesn’t have to be in Germany. We can go to Vienna, New York….I still know some people.”

  It’s tempting. I loved Maria. I still do. But too much has happened. There’s no going back. Now that I know the truth, I think I could sit and laugh with her in her apartment, but only as a guest.

  “No,” I say, wavering, “no, I don’t think so, Maria.”

  She looks at me with a stoic woundedness. “I understand. Here, then. Take this so you know how to find me. In case you need anything. Or you want to write.”

  She writes her address on the concert program. I press my cheek to hers and breathe deeply before I get up to go.

  “Wait,” she calls after me. “There’s one more thing.”

  I turn back. “What is it?”

  She hesitates. “Your father…he had a sister.”

  My ears ring. Can it be true?

  “Is she…alive?”

  “Her name is Ruth,” she says, reaching into her bag. She hands me a crumpled envelope. “She’s a psychologist. She lives in Palestine, in one of those communes. If you wrote to her, she might be able to sponsor you to go there.”

  I have an aunt. Suddenly the world is open. Everything is mine. I bend down and kiss Maria’s cheek and squeeze her hand. She stays sitting on the floor, watching me leave.

  I run grinning into the night and hear a commotion in a distant field. It’s yet another wedding. The bride and groom, lifted on chairs, hold each end of a scarf across a tarp wall stretched between stakes, and it waves in a breeze made by dancing men on one side, dancing women on the other. The couple’s eyes are fixed on each other as they undulate on this sea of strangers, this sea of brethren. I’m mesmerized. A burst of laughter from the party startles me, and I keep running back to my room.

  Waiting on my pillow is a letter. I don’t want to open it—the world is too good right now without Lev’s prolonged goodbyes. I hold the sealed letter as I kick off my shoes. I don’t let it go even as I get out of my dress and under the covers in my slip. Lying in bed, drifting to sleep, I finally open the letter.

  Gerta,

  Someday, when you are on the other side of the world, watching your dreams play out before you, I hope you’ll think of me and maybe drop me a line. Only tell me the happy parts, if you want. I love—even from far away, even for someone else—to see the smile returning to your face, to hear that music wanting to burst from you. Let it. Let the joy come peeking through where it wants, when it wants.

  Always yours,

  Lev

  The morning is already so hot, I’m up before the sun appears over the treetops. All night I sweated in my bed, the thin mattress offering no buffer for my constant tossing and turning. I dreamed of Lev, though I don’t remember what happened. I only remember that I woke up smiling.

  Outside, it’s cooler; while I can get a breath of lighter air, I take a walk toward the meadow path again. The camp is quiet except for some early sounds—dishwater sloshing in pots behind the dining hall, the cry of a baby who rose earlier than his mother would have preferred. I pass the mikvah, shut and silent until nightfall, when the women will come. There is Michah’s tent; God knows who is waking up with him this morning.

  A metallic rhythm grows louder as I walk, exactly like the sound of a train on tracks.

  The sound comes from the open door of the print shop. Through the big windows, I watch the week’s edition of Unzer Sztyme rolling over the cylinders of the press. In the corner, the spidery arms of another small press crawl over a stack of leaflets printed in Hebrew. I’m not sure I realized how early Lev starts work. He stands in front of a tabletop divided into compartments, placing tiny rectangular prisms of leaden letterforms into a bracket in his hand. How quickly his careful hand moves, weaving lines of type, working backward.

  He looks up and sees me standing, transfixed, in the doorway. Our eyes meet, and all of a sudden I remember to breathe. I lift my hand in a tentative wave. He smiles and holds up a finger, telling me to wait a moment. He finishes his block of type and walks toward me, wiping his hands on his apron.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  “Hello, Lev,” I say. “How are you?”

  “Well. I’m well. It’s early for a musician to be up, no?”

  “It’s the heat,” I say, tugging my collar. “I couldn’t stay asleep.”

  “Yes, I know it. These machines don’t help,” says Lev, sweat beading around his eyes. He pulls a handkerchief from his apron pocket and wipes his face.

  “I enjoyed the performance last night,” he says.

  “You were there?” I cringe. “Oh, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Of course I was there. I felt for you. I could never stand in front of a crowd like that.”

  “It never used to bother me before. I wasn’t even nervous last night. Something just…happened. I couldn’t remember a single word.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll come. And I enjoyed the ten seconds I heard,” he teases. The way Lev’s eyes twinkle reminds me of Papa’s smiling eyes, Maria’s raspy laugh, the harmonies of choir children.

  “I got your letter last night,” I say. “You have a way with words, you know.”

  He starts untying his denim work apron. “Maybe I say too much.”

  “No,” I assure him. “I love reading your letters. I missed them.”

  “They’re nothing,” he says, “just my own particulars.”

  “That’s not nothing,” I say. “You should write a book.”

  “Me?” He gestures toward the boxes of alphabets. “No, no. I just run the press for other people’s words.”

  “I think you underestimate yourself, Lev—your writing. You’re good at it.” He doesn’t answer me, but this wistful look comes over his face. A bead of sweat runs down his neck. The heat in the shop grows overwhelming, so we walk out to find breeze and shade. We sit on a half wall just outside, under a great tree marked by bullets.

  “Lev,” I begin, “I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving? Where? How?”

  “Palestine.”

  Lev is quiet for a moment. He meets my eyes with an intensity I haven’t seen in him before. “Palestine, then?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I see,” says Lev, looking down at his stained hands and picking at dried ink under his thumbnail.

  “I have a chance to start over completely,” I say.

  “Ah. Well, I hope you’ll be very happy together. Really, Gerta, mazel tov. I wish you the very best.”

  I’m confused at first. What could he be talking about?

  “Oh! Oh. Lev, you can’t think—no. Did you think I was talking about Michah? That’s over. It wasn’t what I thought it was.”

  “Oh?” He tilts his head, purses his lips.

  “No! I have an aunt I never knew about, on a kibbutz.”

  “That’s wonderful! Family!” He seems intensely relieved. “Ah—but Gerta on a kibbutz, tending farm.” He grins. “That’s a picture.”

  I play along. “I can’t remember. Do potatoes grow on trees or vines?”

  “I don’t think they grow potatoes in the desert, my friend!” It feels so good to laugh with him.

  “Will you be able to sing?” Lev asks. “Are there opera houses there?”

  “There’s Tel Aviv.”

  “Right. Tel Aviv. That’s far away.” He rolls his sleeves up higher. We sit there in silence for a whole minute. I can hear him take short breaths, like he’s about to speak but keeps changing his mind.

  “Lev.” I turn toward him, forcing him to look at me. “You want to say something. It’s all right. If we’re going to say goodbye, let’s be honest with each other.”

  “All right.” He sighs hard. “I don’t want you to go. Because—how do I say this—you know that feeling you get when you’re singing, Gerta, and
you lose yourself in a still lake, and there’s this warmth, and you kind of…cease to exist…”

  “What—”

  “The way I love you, Gerta, it’s like that. It’s like music. It’s like praying.”

  The leaves shimmer in the heat, and the chitter of cicadas rises across the field.

  “I won’t lie,” he continues.“Being friends with you…it’s painful. I’ve tried to think of every way in the world to win you over. But there’s this certain picture you have in mind, and I’m not in it. I know.”

  “But, Lev—” I start, though I have no idea what to say next.

  “The thing is, you’ve made things very clear for me.”

  “Me?” I’m astonished. “How? All I’ve done is confuse things.”

  “No, no.” He stands suddenly. “You let me be myself. You listened. You didn’t try to make me into someone else. That’s another kind of freedom, to have a patient friend who lets you get to the bottom of who you really are.”

  I look down at my shoes. Even outside the print shop, I breathe in the acrid smell of ink settling on the print rollers. The machines have stilled now, but soon, the drums will be turning and printing the news of another, competing paper.

  Lev is saying something, but I’m somewhere else, and I can’t make out the words, just the last bit—

  “You made me feel…joy.”

  My head feels unlidded, too light. Between my shoulders my heart squeezes, as though some doctor were massaging it to life. My voice fills my throat. Not until I lift my head do I realize what I’ve been running from.

  He’s turned to walk back to the shop. “Wait,” I call.

  He stops in the doorway. “Gerta, it’s all right. I didn’t tell you—I’m leaving soon as well. Back to Kielce, to see if there’s anyone left. I got a temporary pass for a few days. Don’t worry. I won’t be stuck here for long.”

  “Wait. Lev—” I run to him and stop just inches from his face. Here are his eyes again, worlds within worlds, the road opening before both of us. In his eyes, I see and am truly seen.

  It’s Lev.

  It’s always been Lev.

  “Gerta, I can’t be this close to you.” His eyes are full of pain. “Please.”

  “What was it you once said, Lev?” I whisper. “When love comes up alongside you…it’s best to take a walk with it.”

  * * *

  —

  We are married in our grove a week later, under the chuppah at twilight. The poles are adorned with budding branches and held by Lev’s fellow newspapermen. He has covered my face with an opaque veil. I can’t see what lies before me, and I must trust Maria and Hélène, standing on either side, to walk me to the canopy. They lead me in procession around Lev, weaving a fortress that only I will enter.

  One of the other violists plays a solemn melody on Papa’s viola. I ache for my father to bless me; I hear Lev weeping, speaking the names of everyone who should be here but is not.

  We make our promises over a brimming cup of red wine and drink deeply from it. Lev crushes a glass wrapped in cloth under his foot; in this one moment, we live years of destruction and joy, past and future.

  I am the fifteenth girl to get married in this dress, made from a soldier’s parachute.

  The girls from my barracks have made this little side room into a bridal suite, with glasses and teapots full of flowers. Hélène has crocheted us a lacy bedspread. It’s all so pretty—and I’m so scared.

  I’m not sure what I ever pictured about losing my virginity. The truth is that I didn’t really ever picture it, even with Michah. There was the time Maria told me how babies get made. But that was all wrapped up in the emergency with my nightgown. I was such a child then, and it was only three years ago. All I know is that Lev and I are just supposed to take off our clothes and figure it out.

  “Gerta?” Lev is standing by the window. He’s just pulled the curtains closed and taken off his hat and jacket.

  “Huh?” I’ve still got my hand on the doorknob. I haven’t blinked in a whole minute. “I don’t…feel well.”

  “Let’s sit down. Come here.” Lev pours me a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I ask. “How this is supposed to…work?”

  “Well, the rabbi told me a little…but I’m pretty sure we’ll know what to—”

  “What have we done?” I’m starting to panic. “I just didn’t think about this being part of it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Well…no. ‘Friends for life,’ remember?”

  Lev’s shoulders sink. I know this was supposed to be a magical night. But the last time I had to undress in front of someone, there were guns and dogs, and I’m trying to remind myself: This is not that…this is not that….

  “Kissing!” I blurt out. “Kissing. We can start there.”

  “Oh!” He’s suddenly heartened. “Sure! That sounds good!” He looks like he’s just been told that he’s inherited a fortune. He leans toward me. We’re too far apart on the bed, and he doesn’t even know what to do with his lips. “No,” I say, putting my fingers up. “You don’t stick them out like that. Here, let me show you.”

  I move closer and touch his nose with mine, and our lips just brush. Our eyes are open and that goofy grin spreads across his face. Just then, he loses his balance on the edge of the bed and slips, knocking a plate of heart-shaped Linzer cookies off the table with a crash. We both burst out laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, sitting there on the floor. “I’m sorry. This is terrible.”

  “I love your kind of terrible.” I laugh. He makes me smile, this boy I’ve just married. This best friend of mine. “Lev…Levi…come here.” I stretch out my hand and pull him back up, and we fall into an instinctive embrace. We’re suddenly quiet, lying next to each other on the pillow, so close. As long as it’s like this, maybe I don’t have to worry.

  “You know what?” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “We’re married. I’m your wife.”

  “That, Gerta Rausch, is complete insanity.”

  He lifts his hand and slowly, barely, runs his fingers along my face.

  “You don’t have that scared look in your eyes this time,” I say.

  “Well, I can touch you now. I don’t have to apologize. Plus, I’m dreaming.” He takes a lock of my hair and spins it around his fingers and then plunges them fully into my hair, and he draws me close, chest to chest. His kiss surprises me; it’s assertive. It demands a response.

  I give him a response.

  “Gerta,” Lev says softly, “can I love you now? As much as I want to?”

  “More than that,” I say, undoing his first button, my heart pounding. He reaches behind me and feels for the zipper of my dress. He pulls the sleeve back off my shoulder to reveal that pretty gray brassiere, to loop his finger through the strap, to rest his lips on my collarbone.

  I peel back the layers and finally get to Lev’s skin. There are signs of old beatings. They’re significant. I kiss each part of him that was so terribly mistreated.

  Nothing’s hurried. It’s all discovery and goose bumps and flinching at unexpectedness.

  I feel the cool night air on my bare skin, the swirling in my chest. There is no shame here, no pretending. It feels…clean. It’s like the first time I saw Lev, through fever-blurred eyes in the medical tent, and he seemed so strangely familiar. We lie there and look at each other, and it’s as though I’m watching him travel through time, as he gained five kilos, ten, twenty—and here he is now, a column of sinew and muscle before me. He is somehow…majestic. Gloriously alive.

  It occurs to me in this moment: I am the only one who will ever see his scars. And he is the only one who ever need see mine.

  Here is a sound:

  Like a distant, rushing wind, with a bit of a whistle in it. Papa on one side, Maria on the other, comforting me from a nightmare. They have turned on the small pink bedside lamp, castin
g light on the photo of the three of us in our bathing suits at Bad Windsheim. My nightmare blinks away—flames, the city in flames, me and Uncle Bernard watching from the dining room window. A woman made of fire is running in and out of the buildings, a woman I used to call Mama. She has a long trail of flame-hair and is blazing toward me with her arms outstretched, calling my name—

  Gerta! Gertalein! Meine Liebe, Gerta!

  And the buildings burn but are not consumed. And here is the image of the Man Who Never Smiles, whose face is everywhere but whose name Papa and Maria never utter. And here is Papa crying in the night, and that sound again—

  Hush…shh…shhh…

  Between Papa and Maria and the photo by the lake.

  Hush…shh…shhh…

  But that was years ago. A childhood ago. This sound—what is it now?

  I am so warm.

  It is the shhh of the radiator hissing steam in our room, of rain on the roof. It is the sound of Lev’s quiet breath on the back of my neck as I curve into his body, here on our first night as husband and wife.

  We board the train for Poland. Lev wants one more chance to find a familiar person in his hometown. It is unusually cool for early July, especially considering how hot it was just last week. I’ve decided to wear my head scarf, now that I’m two weeks into being an old married lady.

  The train to Kielce is a normal passenger train, a strange contrast to our history on the railroad. We have actual tickets, and food in our satchel—cold meat and bread. The fields stretch out before us, green and promising. Pine trees wave as the train rushes past them. The tracks play a waltz; in my mind I hear Chopin.

  “So, wife,” Lev begins, turning to me, a kind of mischievous look in his eyes.

  “Yes, husband?” The word seems so foreign and impossible. We’re children, aren’t we? Who said we could use those words?

  “What are we going to do about our home?”