The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  In the days preceding the tribunal, the entire camp as if in a singular magnified voice had whispered, “Did the Jew lie?”

  A bald man centrally placed began the proceeding. “We begin with our witness, Elena Kabelmacher. Octobrist Kabelmacher, tell us what you saw in the woods. Speak freely and honestly.”

  Everyone’s eyes were upon me. That’s when I felt it, the dirt, the grime, her sticky blood dripping through my fingers, infected with the Jew disease, blood on my hands, will these hands never be clean, and if I’m not careful, if I don’t wash hard enough, I might catch it.

  I washed my hands with my replies. “I saw nothing, I did nothing, I saw nothing,” I repeated, again and again. And Sarah screamed, “No, she’s lying! They did it to her, they harassed her, they tore her clothes, they tortured her, she wanted to save me!” But the men commanded her to quiet down: “Wait until your turn, pioneer Fichtshtein.” She wept for the injustice and betrayal she endured, not in the hands of the judges, but in the hands of her fellow sufferer—in me. She turned on me. “Why are you lying? After everything we’ve been through, why are you lying?”

  Don’t cry, Kabelmacher, ne plach, I told myself, don’t let them see you (dear God I was only seven), don’t let them know what a coward you are.

  “The boys were only joking around,” I insisted. “Sarah just didn’t understand them.”

  “Was she naked and tied up to a tree?” an older man, closest to me, asked.

  “She was wearing her dress when I saw her,” I said, “and as for being tied to a tree, I do remember that there was a tree in the forest.” Everyone laughed, and I blushed. I blushed and lied some more.

  “Why are you making up such terrible things?” the men demanded from Sarah. Oh, how she wept, hysterically, painfully, her entire body convulsing, tears bursting from her nose and mouth. I thought she would choke on them. “I’m not lying, ya govoryu pravdu—I speak the truth.” I heard the words muffled but clear. “Coward,” she had yelled at me as she left the room.“Coward—we, Jews, are all cowards—that’s why they hate us so much!”

  I was afraid of everything: the men at the tribunal, the boys’ retribution, even my mother, but she—Sarah feared nothing, no one, not even this brutal humiliation. For afterwards, the tribunal exonerated the boys and recommended to Sarah’s parents that Sarah be placed under psychiatric evaluation.

  After my mom and I returned to Moscow from the camp, I lay in my bed and drew in the new sketchpad my father bought for me. I’d heat up the thermometer and claim to my grandma that I was ill with fever. Grandmother said, “A fever is no excuse for keeping secrets,” as if she knew. She seated me on a chair in the middle of our biggest room, and said, “What really happened in that swamp for intellectuals?” She probed me for hours. “There are things you’re not telling us. Never conceal! Tell the truth, it’s the only way to recover.” We practiced therapy intuitively, Russian-family style, by pelting people with commands. The truth at last poured out of me, and for the first time since the incident, I cried. The guilt lifted for an instant, like a freight train riding off my chest. “Everything Sarah said was true,” I told my mother and father and grandmother. “The boys poked Sarah’s body with sticks, pushed sticks into her breasts, stuck sticks in there, inside her pipka, until she bled. They tore off my underwear, and said they’d tie me to the tree, like Sarah, if I talk, if I open up my big Jew mouth.”

  I looked at my mother. “I lied to protect you. They said they’d kill you if I told the truth.” Grandmother groaned: “Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy, Bozhenka pomogi nam …” My mother’s face contorted and turned bright red—it was one of the few times in my life that I had witnessed her crying.

  But it was only for a moment. She wiped her cheeks, and the tears disappeared. “But where was your courage? What you did you must undo!”

  “But how?”

  “You must find Sarah and apologize to her,” my mother told me. Sadness and disappointment swam in her eyes, and then I saw the flicker of guilt, as if it was her fault, not mine—the fact of Sarah’s betrayal.

  But by the time we found their address and phone number in Moscow, we reached only Sarah’s aunt, who told us that the Fichtshteins had already emigrated to Israel. That was the turning point in our lives—that irreversible moment when the truth is revealed and can never be taken away. That was when my mother said to my father, “Is this the life you want for our children—a life where they’re forced into betrayal, where heroism is snuffed out before it’s had a chance to bloom?”

  “My God, how terrible, you were so young, how could you understand these things? Such cruelty to children!” Eddie broke through my memory.

  “The irony, of course, is that this incident is why we’re here,” I explained.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We applied for an exit visa right after the incident. My father finally agreed with my mother: that to remain in Russia would be an act of great inhumanity to us, the children.”

  “Yes, well, I’m glad he did,” Eddie said, but I could see his mind drifting through my story, not fully comprehending it.

  “Jews were being refused left and right in 1980,” I said, “and there we were, just beginning our wait. I don’t know how we got out—on a fluke, I suspect. By 1982 no one was being let out. But there we were. Here I am.”

  I looked at him beseechingly, seeking in his eyes something soothing, ameliorating.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, “you have to recognize that.”

  “Oh, but it was. I could have told the truth. I was a coward.”

  “You were a child, Emma, a child! And you were terrified. Your mother was wrong to reprimand you.”

  “I betrayed Sarah. If I was tortured the way my grandfather or great-grandmother or great-great uncle were tortured by Stalin’s goons, I would have spilled the beans before the stick would ever hit my face, before a single nail on my pinky would be pulled out. I was weak—yes, a child but already weak of heart.”

  He lifted my chin with a single finger. “Look at me,” he said, “look at me. You are not weak. You are incredible and strong, and I didn’t understand—”

  “No, no, you still don’t understand—the rot is in me! It wasn’t just that society that was horrible and rotten, but us—each individual couldn’t help but become infected by that disease. I got infected. The rot crawled into me and I’m not sure I’ve gotten it out yet. I too was possessed, but not just with fear—with hatred. I hated Sarah for her weakness, for crying, for revealing her feelings at the tribunal, for being so sensitive, even for telling on the boys. But I hated the boys even more—flies, I thought in my head, insects, hideous vermin, you are beneath us. In my mind, I took Sarah’s hand and we flew above them and mid-flight turned into dragons and then descended on them all—the boys, the men, the audience I imagined, our wrath spewing out of our mouths and consuming the whole room in a great purple fire. We will triumph one day, one day … That’s why I told myself I must hide, must keep silent for now, must remember and then transcend. Transcend and then what? Transcend what, whom exactly?

  “Can’t you see I can’t get past this? I’m stuck in a cage, and every time I try to claw my way out, I fall right back in. And somewhere deep inside I’m not me—not the person I appear to other people, not the woman you see before you, but the child still hiding, peering out of this adult body.”

  “But you don’t hide,” he gently contradicted. “You reveal yourself. You announce who you are—you are far stronger than the sum of your past events.”

  “What I reveal is only a tiny fraction of what I am—”

  “It’s strange, but I know exactly what you mean—the feeling of never fully sharing, never being able to fully express—”

  “You and I are not the same, Eddie.”

  “Look Emma, we create the cage ourselves with our bare hands to punish ourselves for the things we did and did not do, for the sake of punishment itself. You’ve got stop blaming yourself, not j
ust for your past, but for your present—you’ve got to paint! Paint it all out, that’s your only chance to heal. Paint that scene—the child in the forest—paint it as you see it inside your head.”

  “I can’t—I can’t face the possibility of failure. I can’t devote my whole self to this only to find out that I’m mediocre, that the coordination between my mind and hands is adequate at best, that the emotions bubbling within are true and deep but can never appear on the canvas as they do in my head. I am so afraid—you can’t imagine such fear—afraid that I will bleed out trying, that my failure will be the end of me. My humiliation will result in a full retreat …”

  “Are you prepared to wonder your whole life what it would’ve been like to paint full time? Nothing is easy, Emma, certainly not the life of an artist, and this coordination you speak of is a matter of practice and sweat and grit. To do something with your whole self means working on these images for the long haul, for months, even years—imagine how far you could go! What’s the alternative? Not painting at all? Painting as a hobby? You’re not equipped for that—the compromise will kill you.”

  “Yes—but how is it that you know this—you, who’s known me for such a short time, know the very root of me? I never thought such a man could exist!” I could feel the tears and the gratitude and the gushing joy intermingling with wonder and disbelief, all rising to the surface.

  “Life is not supposed to be this easy,” I cried out. “Who said human beings are supposed to be happy? Who said I had any right to bite into this pie?”

  “Americans,” he replied, laughing.

  “Yes, yes, Americans, America!” I rose out of the bathtub and pressed my breasts onto his lathered chest.

  “You’re gorgeous, simply gorgeous,” he said, smiling, as if relieved to return to our first, our most vital bond. Tentacles seemed to grow out of his black pupils and wrap each breast, and trace the curve of my stomach to the contours of my waist. His eyes devoured, absorbed me, infused me with confidence and power. Through his eyes I saw myself billowing, growing taller, more beautiful, and I balked at it—the male gaze—and turned the female gaze on him. His skin was brown and silky, and the water slid down his chest as if gliding on a stone surface. I traced his muscles with my fingers as though I were mapping out my creation, my sculpture, my ideal man, reaching deep into the water. Only intermittently, through his muffled moans, did I catch my own skin against his, my own whiteness against his brown expanse. The contrast was so extreme that I flinched at the sheer physical distance between us.

  I was whiter than anyone I knew, white like my sister, mother, and grandmother, whiter than the underside of arms on my pale American friends, whiter than a fresh new canvas. We burned in heat on gray days, blistered in the sun, peeled and heaved with pain, our skin populated by wild rashes. It was the only physical aspect of myself I couldn’t erase—my own sense of my distinct Russianness, and when my hair darkened in the water, losing its reddish and golden hues, the contrast against my face was so extreme that my features intensified and increased in size, taking me from my Russianness to my Jewishness. And I wondered as I watched us in the marble reflection if he knew what I was thinking, if he knew how madly I desired the merging of our contrasts, if that alone—this difference in skin and features—was what drew me to him.

  “I want you so much I feel like I could burst,” I said, my lips moving along his chest. His eyes glistened and he pressed me so hard against himself I felt my skin gluing to his skin.

  “Marry me,” he said, kissing my face, “marry me, Emma.”

  “I—I—”

  Suddenly a noise erupted from my purse, a grating ring tone that I instantly recognized as my new cell phone, drawing my swelling heart out of my body like a powerful magnet and then deflating it mid-flight. In an area where cell phone service was practically non-existent and few towers had been built, that sound could only have meant one thing: Mom and Grandma had erected a virtual cell tower with their formidable Russian telepathy in order to cross state lines and yank me from the arms of the “wrong” man. Because Life, with a capital L, was not simply about the diligent upkeep of misery and suffering, but about the swift eradication of all seedlings of happiness.

  “I have to get that,” I said, rising from the tub. “It’s my mom and grandma—they don’t know where I am and if I don’t pick up, they’ll think I’m dead or have been abducted by the KGB.”

  “Tell them you’ve been abducted by a goy,” he cried out, laughing. “How can you leave—you can’t leave me like this.” He lay there naked and erect under the black water. As I wiped myself with a white towel, I felt a sudden desire to weep. I held the phone in my wet hand and a familiar voice said, “Lenochka, gde ty? You must come here right away—we have an absolute pandemonium here.” It took me a few seconds to place the tonality, to remember that the only person whose lilting voice could move as easily from Russian to English as my own was Bella. “They know,” she said at once, and then the line went dead.

  PART III

  A Gentile on Our Lawn

  By the time Mom and Grandma and Dad were presented with the disturbing news that I was now co-habiting with a certain Catholic hooligan/investment banker named Eddie; that I had already, without informing them, canoodled with his parents during a fancy lunch; and that—here’s where heart-related emergency room visits were being heavily touted—I was in love, a concept so laughable Grandmother spat on her kolbasa, they were too exhausted to fight. Anger over Alexei Bagdanovich and disappointment over not being able to attend our wedding had taken a vicious hold in the Russian suburbs of Chicago (which included but was not limited to Buffalo Grove, Long Grove, Downers Grove, the entirety of Grove Meadows and Des Plaines, and critical patches of Highland Park). Our fifth-removed cousin, Svetochka, called to complain that it was impossible to sit through a dental cleaning without overhearing some assistant call Lenochka a flaky blyat. For my grandmother there couldn’t have been a worse fate.

  Valiantly, she defended me against the naysayers, and to restore my honor, spoke of my future as a professor of mathematics and my new brilliant boyfriend, neglecting to mention that he was an American, a goy, and had no plans to get a PhD in any scientific subfield. It was, of course, an irony if they’d ever heard one: Zinayida Genadevna trying to buoy her granddaughter’s reputation by pretending that any other boyfriend could be as brilliant as Alex! The other irony was that no one cared that he wasn’t Jewish half as much as my grandmother did. Lots of immigrant children were intermarrying. There were Jewish-Catholic weddings with bickering priests and rabbis; secular weddings between agnostic Jews and non-churchgoing WASPs officiated by rabbis disguised as non-denominational chaplains or, in Jewish speak, Reform rabbis; Indian weddings between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman, but her first love was an Indian man whom she was forbidden to marry, which accounted for a wedding menu of tandoori chicken, samosas, naan bread, and rogan josh. A smattering of other unmarriageable men could be represented by, say, spring rolls, tuna sashimi, and a generous helping of kimchi. For a woman who had fallen in love with a black man, there was always relief in music: a rendition of “Hava Nagila” that sounded suspiciously like Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” Most popular of all were the Russian weddings gripped in an identity crisis: there was the mandatory chuppah; an officiant who wore a yarmulke and claimed to be a rabbi, and spoke Hebrew as if he were yelling at his wife in Russian; an abundance of lobster, shrimp, and ham-accented dishes; Russian 70s music; numerous bad renditions of “Shalom Aleichem”; and possible performances by (1) belly dancers, (2) ballet dancers doing Swan Lake, (3) ballroom dancers doing the tango, or (4) any of the invited guests performing any of the above.

  Grandmother loathed them all. Grandmother’s loathing was particularly pleasing to the Russians now that the Kabelmachers appeared to be in an identity crisis of their own. After all, who could forget the way my grandmother, that righteous and indignant prophet, called every intermarriage a blight on the Jewish com
munity, flushing with the wrath of a wronged woman?

  What a hypocritical fool you turned out to be, they seemed to be whispering in her ears! It seemed right to them—in fact, an excellent opportunity—to poke at our sensitive underbelly and avenge us for making so much money. At parties, there was veiled mockery of Zinayida Genadevna, phony sympathy for her predicament, and jabs at the Kabelmacher women; just as no one knew where their money came from, so no one knew “what spells their daughters cast over men,” which in translation read, “yes, we know, and it is sex.” No one envied my mother and grandmother now, and still the evil eye roamed freely, causing my mother migraines and my grandmother heartburn-related insomnia that even Tchaikovsky couldn’t cure.

  Grandmother and Mother retreated into a deep depression and turned inward, specifically on me.

  “You’ve fallen in love with everyone—couldn’t you have fallen in love with a Jew?” my mother asked during a three-way conference call, while my father and grandmother hummed loudly.

  “Bliny ob’eylas!” quipped my father, which roughly translated into “you’re crazy!”

  “Bring him here,” Grandmother simply commanded. “I want to see this goy who’s ruining our lives!”

  “If you have to marry a goy,” my mother warned, “he better be truly great to make up for the fact that he’s not Jewish.”

  For five minutes, Eddie and I stood at the door, ringing the bell, listening to voices booming, trickling through the brick exterior. I felt only relief and gratitude that Americans were unilingual and that my Eddie did not know an ounce of Russian, except for a few choice words I chose to teach him.