The Belief in Angels

by J. Dylan Yates

  I find David still sitting in the den, watching TV.

  “No Moses yet?”

  David shakes his head.

  “He’s not down there,” I say.

  David stares back and I can see the realization cross his face that something must be wrong. It’s starting to darken outside, tomorrow is a school day, and it’s rare for Moses to be doing anything on a Sunday night except playing in his room or finishing homework. “I’m gonna check around the neighborhood,” he says. “Maybe you should call his friend? Do you know his number?”

  “Good idea,” I say, and as I’m standing there trying to remember his friend’s last name so I can look him up in the phone book, it hits me, hard. It hits me so hard my body goes numb.

  David tries to move past me on his way out.

  “What is it, Jules?” he asks, impatient.

  “The b-b-boat,” I stammer.

  “You think Moses used the boat by himself and went fishing without you? Well, if he did, he might still be out there! Let’s go down to the yacht club and check. But I don’t think he’d do it. He knows he’s not supposed to. Come on.”

  He grabs my arm and pulls me towards the door.

  I’m grateful to David for many things in this moment. The terrible dread I feel makes it difficult to move my limbs. Normally I am all action in a bad moment, but standing there on the steps it’s as though my body knows something my mind is finding it difficult to believe. I’m grateful for David’s kindness in ignoring my stammer. I’m grateful because he’s helping me move toward a moment when we will both be present.

  He pulls me toward the front door, but I struggle to go outside through the den.

  The shed.

  In the shed, I think, I will find two fishing poles, and then I’ll know he hasn’t gone to the boat. I try to loose myself from David’s grip, but he holds me too strongly. When did he get so strong? I don’t have the strength to pull myself away. I have to talk again.

  “Th-the sh-sh-sh …” I point toward the backyard and David understands. He runs ahead of me now toward the back of the yard, under the weeping willow, where the shed stands. He pulls it open and we search inside. Moses’s fishing pole is missing, along with the tackle box.

  “No t-t-tackle.”

  My body gathers energy. David and I run down Withensea Avenue toward the yacht club.

  I run faster than I’ve ever run before. David stands over a head taller than me and is three years older, and I’m running as fast as he is.

  I think how angry I’ll be with Moses for using the boat without me. I imagine what I’ll say to him, how he should be punished, even how it might benefit me to keep the secret and hold it over him. I know David would do this. David might demand twenty trips to the store for candy, for free. No splits.

  Those thoughts alternate with others. Hope that he’s back at the house, maybe hiding someplace, playing a trick on us? Hope that he decided not to take the boat after all. Hope that he followed the rules, that he was good and waited for me to show up at the yacht club when I didn’t find him. Maybe fished on the dock all day.

  Why didn’t I think of this before? Why didn’t I check the shed when I got back instead of thinking he’d be with Howard or David?

  I was entranced with the quiet. I wanted—needed—a day to draw and enjoy some solitude for once.

  Howard disappointed him by not showing up and he didn’t want to wait for me, because I might disappoint him as well.

  If the boat is there, make Jack put oarlocks on the boat. Then Moses can’t take it out without someone. When he shows up, don’t leave him alone again. If Moses is okay, be nicer to both of your brothers. If he’s okay, be a better person.

  David and I run around to the back of the club where we moor our dinghy, right next to a fishing boat named Elysian Fields. This makes me think of the wooden woman.

  You said everything was going to be all right. You promised. Please let Moses be all right. Please. If you’re really an angel, show me now and I won’t ever ask you again.

  We stop in front of the empty space our dinghy usually occupies and we simultaneously look out to the spot where Jack moors his sailboat, hoping the dinghy sits anchored there instead, which would mean Jack is using his boat today. But the sailboat is there.

  The sailboat is there and the dinghy is gone.

  Every ounce of energy and hope I keep in not finding this fact pours out of my body. My body freezes again. David seems frozen there too. We stand like statues on the dock, squinting out across the bay as the fog begins to roll in, scanning for Moses in the dusk light.

  I want to make a plan. I want to take care of the situation and I want to fix the fact that this is happening. I want, badly, to see Moses rowing his way back on the horizon, and I know David does too because we run toward the end of the dock together, scrambling as close as we can to a place where we might see him.

  I run, but I can’t feel my own legs moving.

  We’re screaming Moses’s name, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own.

  We call and call and stop to listen. Our voices echo back to us across the water. Mocking.

  We stand there calling as the sky loses all the light. The dusk turns from an inky blue to an iron black, the buoy lights ghostly against the rolling fog.

  There is never an answer.

  Part 2 | The Hour of Lead

  Fifteen

  Samuel, 61 years | September 22nd, 1971

  WEST ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS

  I STAND AT the keyver with the rest of the mourners.

  The child. Moses.

  I am aware of the shomeret standing at the gravesite. I find comfort in her presence. She was recommended by the rabbi, and there is something strangely familiar about this young woman, although we’ve never met before. She sat with the child at the mortuary since the death three days ago.

  It is too long. We waited for the father to catch a plane from California where he lives now.

  Despicable father. Disgraceful father.

  It is well past the accepted twenty-four hours customary for a corpse to wait before entering the earth. But it also gave us time to find the proper Shomer and Chevrah Kaddisha to perform the washing ritual, the Tahara.

  We stand for the service as the cantor chants.

  I look to find the father. He stands to my left, head bowed, wearing the kipah handed him as he approached the keyver, but his black suit is intact. He has not performed k’riah.

  I stare at him. When he glances up, I will point to his suit and remind him, but I realize he may not understand. This thought makes me angry—angry for his ignorance, his lack of respect, and angry for the arrogance of the modern Jews whose freedom came at such a terrible cost to the generations before them. But this man is not Jewish, I remind myself. No, he is not a Jew at all. This man is shlekht.

  As though my anger has turned to poison, all the numbness in my body melts away and I am filled with a searing, crushing pain that courses from my head through my body and down to the soles of my feet.

  I find myself standing in front of the father, and without thinking I am tearing off his left lapel—the fabric directly over his heart. He seems surprised and a bit afraid.

  I think to myself, This is good. I want him to feel fear.

  I am thinking if I could tear his heart out with the fabric, I might avenge this child’s death somehow and make this pain abate.

  There is pressure of a hand at my elbow. It is the rabbi. He leads me away from the father. I let myself be led. I am too weak to tear the heart from this man. I am an old man at sixty-one years. I have barely the strength to tear anything, including the thread from my needles.

  At the thought of my hands tearing thread, the arthritic pain in my hands intensifies. I shove them deep into the pockets of my mourning coat to hide the intense shaking that has begun with the pain in my joints.

  This same arthritis paralyzes my body at the end of the day and meets me when I wake in the morning. It is wors
t on these cold New England days.

  For the past week we’ve been in the hottest days of summer. But today, the fall came like lightning. The sky is like a city sidewalk. Gritty and grainy-gray.

  I wear the mourning coat made for me a few years earlier by Rose.

  Rose.

  She passed two months ago, a year after Mocher’s death and ten months after Yetta’s death.

  Rose and Mocher lived in Florida for years, but with her passing I have a deep sense of desolation. Rose was the one who helped me carry my sadness. Somehow she managed to survive our sorrow and taught me to do the same. Standing there at Moses’s keyver, I realize when I lost Rose, the light in my world switched off. When Rose is alive, she helped me see that my life had been a difficult struggle, but that I could also boast having fulfilled my father’s main directive: to survive.

  With her passing, however, life became nothing but an expanse of nothingness once more. The same way it is when I arrive in America all those years ago after the war. I have become unable to control my thoughts or my actions toward others with any consistency. I can’t fully breathe. My sorrow forms a thick blanket over my body, protecting me but also isolating me from my own experience. I felt broken all those years ago, and the pain is doubled now.

  Oh, Rose, here I am in my grief, my tsar, mourning the loss of this child. Please let the World to Come be a good one. This life has been hard for me to shoulder on my own. Or join me there, in our World to Come. I am certain that with you by my side I can walk forward without fear or anguish.

  I am reminded of a time, long ago, when I made a similar prayer. I stood at another gravesite. I functioned as cantor, singing the prayers for the ceremony. I prayed with many Turkish Jews who came to pray by the grave, spoke the Prayer For The Dead, and sat shiva in a Turkish synagogue for the days following the ceremony. I arranged for the service when I got released from the hospital.

  The keyver held the bodies of several hundred bodies drowned nearly two months before, stacked, one atop the other, in a shallow grave. As it had been at the camp.

  The survivors of the blast and the Jewish community living openly there in Turkey begged the British officials not to burn the bodies, which had been their custom in these situations, but instead to honor and respect the religious practices of these people, these Jews, for whom cremation is a sin against G-d. Despite their terrible cruelty against these people, the Brits listened and for once behaved in a civilized way, allowing us to bury them.

  But I do not want to think about another terrible day. This is the terrible day I must live now. The death of this sweet child, the death I mourn today. My hands tremble in my pockets. The bottoms of my pockets are shredding with wear. Perhaps I will repair the pockets. But why? Why should I repair a coat I never want to wear again?

  This life is filled with too much sorrow.

  I pray I will not wear this coat again, kehnahore. I pray I am the next to go.

  I stare across the gravesite.

  The mother of this child stands on the other side of the rabbi. She has brought the nebish, the one called Jack. She wears a short black dress. Too short. I can see the skin of her arms and her chest through the lace on this dress. This is a dress for a party. The mother of this child dressed like a kurve for her child’s funeral. I feel no surprise. I have no anger. I am through being angry with this woman. I have no feeling for her left in me. I have given up on feeling where she is concerned.

  I remember a time, long ago, when she brought joy. She was as young then as this child in the ground before us.

  I treated her as my daughter. She is the child I helped to raise, first in my parents’ apartment, then with Yetta. She is the child her mother named Wendy, after the Wendy of Peter Pan. This was Wendy’s mother’s favorite book.

  She is the brilliant child, the prodigy, who taught herself to read English by asking the vendors who came to my parents’ apartment to translate words. “How do you say?” is the first English phrase she spoke.

  “Ice. Not ayz.” She corrected the family when we made errors.

  I wanted her to become fluent in English to improve her life. I didn’t realize she planned to ignore her heritage, marry a Catholic, and denounce our religion once she could abandon the language we spoke. My parents said that by the age of five she read the entire dictionary from cover to cover and refused to speak anything but English with the family. They indulged her. Yes, it was fehler to indulge a child, and we knew. We all knew. We could see her iberfim zikh before our eyes, like an overripe fruit, but we all wanted to give her all we had been denied. She became our light and our reason.

  She grew to be a plump and pretty child. A healthy girl. My mother, a wonderful cook, fed her well. Then, Yetta.

  This woman who was that child has never resembled me. She is more like the woman who bore her. She does not know this. She does not know the woman and never will. We never spoke of it. It is done.

  She came to live with us when she turned ten. We didn’t understand that ten is old enough to understand the world, and we treated her like a child. A brilliant child, yet still a child.

  She realized she’d been adopted by my parents when she turned seventeen and applied for her driver’s license. We forgot she would need her birth certificate for this and at first refused to allow her to have it. I told her we didn’t want her to drive a car to keep her from suspecting our motive.

  Rose convinced me to tell her the truth. “Samuel, are you going to forbid her from getting married too? She needs the certificate for this.”

  We thought she would never have to know. We were unprepared for her questions and the hostility that followed when we refused to provide the information she wanted about her true parentage. This was the first time in her life she did not receive what she wanted from us. We realized we hadn’t prepared her for this disappointment. It was never the same with us after that.

  Now, she visits to collect money. There is no love in our meeting. There is disappointment for us both.

  Standing here over the grave of her youngest child, I have no sorrow for her. I grieve for the child, the one who reminded me of Idel. I also grieve for the other children, who will be left with Wendy.

  The children who are not here.

  The father decided it would be wrong for them to see their brother in the ground.

  “It would give them nightmares,” he said when I asked why they wouldn’t be honoring their brother at the funeral.

  He is a fool. I suffered these losses at their ages. There is no avoiding the suffering. There is no avoiding the pain. The children now know a sorrow unlike any other. It will shape them in ways that will affect the rest of their lives. It is the phantom pain in the heart where a muscle should be beating but is gone. Even now, the pain is present.

  I think about the suffering my family and I have endured.

  First, the devastation of losing my elder brother, Gershon, to typhus, in the same year our beloved Bubbe Chava passed. Then the murder of Idel and Berl by the Russian soldiers. And a different kind of murder with the loss of Sura and Ruchel. The camps, the Mefkura murders, the separations.

  Now this, the loss of this child, Moses.

  Where is Idel’s angel for all of them?

  Perhaps Idel’s angel is a vengeful angel?

  This new rabbi from our synagogue teaches that there are no angels. Angels are modern-day pagan idols, he says. He says it is time for us to recognize what we create here in our life on earth, that it is our own creation and not the work of an otherworld. When we take responsibility for our misdeeds we will create a better world.

  I like this rabbi. I like his new ideas and that he speaks about the Torah in a way which takes us out of the Middle Ages and into modern times.

  I know I am alone in my age group in these thoughts. I have heard the grumblings of the community sitting with me on the left side of the synagogue, up at the front, where the learned sit. I smile to think I am included in this group of learned men. I
never studied the Talmud. I never went to college. I attended school at my father’s table back at the farm. These men accepted me into their group knowing nothing about me. I am Mocher’s brother-in-law, and this is good enough.

  Yetta. Poor Yetta. It seems I have only recently finished saying the Kaddish for her. She died of pneumonia after a long illness and hospitalization. I hated all the visits. The smell reminding me of the time after the Mefkura when I spent months recovering in a Turkish hospital.

  Yetta and I found a quiet peace between us those years after Wendy left and started her own family. It became as it always should have been.

  She was a great money saver. I discovered this after she passed. She kept her money in a shoebox stuffed away in the back of our closet. Until her death I had no idea how much she managed to save. When I found the box with all the cash rubber-banded and stacked neatly into fives, tens, fifties, hundreds … I am astonished to learn she had saved over ten thousand dollars.

  I gave her such a small amount each month. I always expected she would ask for more, but she found a way to maintain the same budget for twenty years, even as prices for everything spiked up. She began saving market stamps toward the end of her life. The markets worked out ways to entice their customers’ loyalties, and she found a way by collecting these stamps to cut the grocery bills in half. She walked miles to save a few pennies on a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs.

  How she managed to save such a great amount could be explained by her behavior, but the thing I wondered about, the biggest mystery of Yetta and her hidden treasure, is why? What was she saving for?

  I will never know.

  There were no one-dollar bills. Yetta knew I never liked the American one-dollar bills. The eagles on them remind me of the sculpture at the entry to Majdanek—the insane, mocking sculpture with the three eagles imprisoned in concrete.

  Yetta’s body lies here. Her headstone, which was installed and unveiled recently, is to the left of this gravesite. I purchased plots for the rest of the family this week. We would be together in the earth, if not on it. Wendy told me she planned to be cremated when I told her of the purchase today.