I Am Forbidden

by Anouk Markovits

  Hannah set in front of the boy a glass of milk, two slices of buttered bread topped by two slices of tomato sprinkled with salt. “Blessed art Thou Adonaï.… Now eat, Gutten Appetit.”

  In between oven and baking board, Hannah turned the pages of little Etti’s aleph-beth.

  Etti pointed her chubby finger to the black letter. “Aleph!”

  “Josef, surely you remember your aleph-beth?” Hannah said.

  The boy stared at the pink ribbon in Etti’s hair. He pushed back his chair, walked out of the kitchen, to the front door.

  Zalman called from the study: “He went outside before saying grace?”

  “Don’t push the child,” Hannah said.

  “You call obeying God’s command pushing a child?”

  Josef was banging his foot against the stone stairs in the courtyard.

  “A Jewish boy doesn’t stand idle,” Zalman called from the window. “Come inside.”

  The boy did not budge.

  It was then that Mila hurried down the stairs and stopped a few treads above him.

  “Anghel? It’s me, Mila.”

  He took a slow step toward her. He blinked. She turned on her heels. He followed her up the stairs.

  • • •

  During the Sabbath meal, when Zalman handed him a slice of challah, the boy thanked him in Romanian, “Mulţumesc.”

  “One speaks Yiddish at the Sabbath table. Yiddish is the language God considers his own,” Zalman coached.

  Between courses, Josef stashed a challah bun into his pocket.

  “The poor boy must have gone hungry,” Hannah whispered in the kitchen when the girls cleared the table.

  In bed, in the dark, Mila whispered to Atara, “The bun is not for him, it’s for Florina.”

  Sunday, Josef argued behind the closed door of Zalman’s study. “What does she tell the field hands? What does she say happened to me? Who was I?”

  “The Eibershter will reward Doamna Florina a thousandfold, in this world and the next. I will also see to it, she will not lack a thing. As for you, our people in America are moving Heaven and earth. It won’t be long before your affidavit arrives.”

  “I don’t want to go to America. I don’t need to. Florina baptized me.”

  Zalman leapt out of his seat. He struggled to take hold of himself. He leaned forward. His nose almost touching the Talmud tome, he inhaled deeply. When he lifted his face, it was serene again. “The Rebbe is planning a holy community in America. He is asking for you.”

  “If I plow the big fields in America, I can bring Florina?”

  “A boy your age thinks of Torah study, not of plows and fields.”

  “I will not see Florina again?”

  “Only the Riboïne shel Oïlem knows such things.”

  “What’s Riboïne shel Oïlem?”

  “Why—the Master of the Universe Who saved you once and Who will save you again by returning you to a world of Torah. Be grateful, Josef Lichtenstein. In time, you will send the woman money, parcels. You’ll send her coffee, sugar, but a boy your age belongs in yeshiva. Only Torah study will bring the messiah and only the messiah will return our dead—yes, yes, our martyred ones will live again.”

  “My mother, father, Pearela?”

  “They will rise whole as if nothing happened. The Trumpets will sound. At the first blast, the world will shake. At the second blast, the dust will break up. The bones will gather at the third blast.” Taking in the boy’s wide-open eyes, Zalman smiled. “Your great-granduncle Reb Elimelech was a renowned Torah scholar. People traveled days just to glimpse at him, and you, too, can grow into a ben Torah; you, too, can hasten the coming of the messiah, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith.”

  “Anghel.”

  “Forget Anghel. Anghel is a name of fear. A Jew who fears God need not fear the Goyim. Be grateful, Josef Lichtenstein, our Lord saved you once and then He saved you again by bringing you back into His fold.”

  Curled under the eiderdown, Josef clutched its faded tassels and chased his memories. “Be grateful.…”

  He hadn’t thought of telling Florina when she whispered, Mama wants Anghel to live.… Every night, hands nestled between her hands, feet between her calves, he had clung to the sound of Florina’s breath, but he hadn’t thought of telling her that he was grateful.

  Zalman informed the family that there was no time to waste in getting Josef ready for his bar mitzvah. Every morning, he took the boy into his study. Mila and Atara could hear, behind the closed door, Josef’s thin, startled voice repeating the name of each cantillation, and Zalman coaching: “In the holy tongue, cantillation signs are called taamim, which also means flavors. These little flourishes above and below the letters not only score the melody of the text, they bring out its essence. In time you, too, will savor the holy verses.”

  The boy’s uncertain voice chanted after Zalman: “Kadmaah munah zarka-a-a-ah.…”

  Zalman bellowed: “Let your voice rise, come out of hiding, Josef, son of Yekutiel!”

  In Josef’s sleep, the black-limbed curlicues scuffled and spun threads he could not unravel, Zalman stories within Christ stories amid which Josef searched for a last letter, a first letter, that spelled a lost word.…

  THE WEEK before the High Holy Days, Zalman sat an uneasy Josef on a chair placed on top of unfolded newspapers and called for the children. He untied a knot above his ear and let down a thick dark curl. “The Lord tells us, You shall not round the corners of your heads.” Then, picking up a razor, he said to Josef: “You, too, must wear God’s mark if you want Him to recognize you as His own. In Egypt, Jews maintained their traditions; they did not adapt dress, language, or names, and the Lord recognized them and took them out of bondage.”

  The boy’s hair fell on the newspapers as Zalman shaved him to the scalp, leaving two sidecurls.

  That night, Mila and Atara heard the boy steal down the stairs. From their open window, they saw him run down the dimly lit street, to the church at the end of the block. They watched him huddle against the dark portal that so disquieted the girls.

  Later, lying in bed, they heard a thin, continuous wail. They held their breaths. The wail persisted. Mila rose. Her bare feet fluttered on the parquet as she left the room. The wail stopped.

  Mila held the boy’s shorn head between her arms, pressed it against her heart, warmed him with her whispers: “Shayfeleh … Shayfeleh.…”

  THE DAYS OF AWE came. In Zalman’s modest synagogue in the ancient city of Sibiu / Nagyszeben / Hermannstadt, they gathered: survivors from Transylvania Bukovina Galicia, and Slovakia Bohemia Moravia, and Podolia Volhynia Silesia.… They rounded one another up, Jews who wished they could forget they were Jews and thin bent shadows who knew someone would remember; Jews who spoke no Romanian; Jews who spoke only Romanian.

  Zalman’s voice rose and they pressed forward. From the front pews to the last standing row, in the men’s section downstairs, in the women’s balcony, on the stairs leading to the vestibules, they thrust toward the raised platform where Zalman pleaded in his white robe that Jews, this year, be inscribed in the Book of Life.

  And some of the sobs were asking not forgiveness but redress, as Zalman’s voice billowed, El maleh rachamim … God full of compassion.…

  During the service for the dead, children with parents slipped past the tears and skipped outside the synagogue. If, by accident, an unorphaned toddler was found inside, caught between grown-up legs, a cry went up, as if evening a score: “Let this child out, this child is not a mourner!” Atara and the younger siblings played in the courtyard during the service for the dead, but Mila and Josef stood within.

  And Josef recognized the chant Zalman had sung by the graves, El maleh rachamim.… In Zalman’s synagogue, it was not silent furrows that met the boy’s loss, not harvesters leaning on hayforks, jeering at Florina’s bastard, but wails and incantations to turn absence into meaning. In Zalman’s synagogue, everyone wept with the boy as he remembered the smell of woolen prayer sh
awls and yellowing books in his father’s pew.

  And the boy sensed that part of him longed for the name that was his when he had mother, father, sister. Like Zalman at the lectern, he, Josef Lichtenstein, wanted the lost world to live again.

  A few weeks later, Josef’s papers arrived.

  THE ENTIRE family accompanied Josef to the station; Zalman, Hannah with the new baby pressed to her bosom, Mila and the Stern children holding hands.

  The train doors clicked shut. Josef reappeared at a window, half hidden by the eiderdown. His face was still tanned but it looked bare, fragile, without the frame of hair.

  Pipes gasped. The train started to roll.

  Josef’s eyes were fixed on Mila, on her braids flying about her face as she ran to keep up with his car.

  The train faded to a dot, vanished. Arms limp at her sides, Mila stood at the far edge of the platform, above the bed of cracked stone.

  Fall 1947

  ZALMAN gathered the family in his study. The Talmud tomes that ordinarily lay open on his desk were wrapped in cloth. “Children, you have come to think of Sibiu as your home, but until the Almighty delivers us from exile, we Jews have no home.” He lifted a stack of folios and placed them in a wooden crate. “The government is closing down our schools, the communists—let their names be erased—want you to forget you are Jews. A small congregation in Paris needs a cantor. We are leaving.”

  Mila and Atara looked up in surprise. They had heard Zalman yearn for the great yeshiva towns of Pressburg, Slobodka, Lezhinsk—never for Paris. Mila reached for Atara’s hand, relieved that if they were to go, they would be going together.

  The children were not to be sad, there had been far worse partings; nor were they to delight in being condemned to wander. When their playmate Marika called from the yard, Hannah warned that there was no time for games or farewells. The children heard Marika’s pebble strike the cobbles, and her count as she hopped over the chalk lines. They listened to her silence as she picked up the marker. “Atara, Mila, I won!”

  One last morning, Mila and Atara woke in their shared bed. They listened to the swallows’ twitter under the eave. They helped carry the cardboard suitcases and cloth bundles, helped load the horse cart.

  Hugging the baby to her chest, Hannah climbed on top of the luggage, on top of the flatbed. Zalman lifted the toddlers and placed them next to her. Mila and Atara followed the cart on foot. Behind them walked Zalman and the eldest boy, five-year-old Schlomo.

  Marika jumped rope beside the girls until the cart turned the corner. “You’re not coming back? Ever?” She stood at the corner, hopping from foot to foot and calling after them, “Ever-ever?”

  Mila and Atara helped load the bundles and suitcases onto the train. The family settled into a compartment. The train pulled out of the station. The weathercock on the copper dome flew away. The clock tower shrunk out of sight. Apartment blocks gave way to cottages, to thatched huts, to kerchiefed women tilling vegetable patches. The children waved to the women, to the horse harnessed to a lumber cart, to cheese bags tied to porch beams, to the southern Carpathians, to nightfall on the Cibin.

  Darkness rattled past the window. The baby whimpered and Hannah placed him at her breast. The suckle filled the compartment. Atara leaned her head against Mila’s shoulder and Mila leaned her head against Atara’s head. The girls, who so wanted to stay awake for every moment of the journey, were soon rocked to sleep.

  “The hen! It’s running from the train!” Mila cried out.

  Hannah leaned toward the girls. “Shh, it’s a dream, only a dream.”

  “The hen doesn’t want to die!” Mila protested.

  “Shh, you’ll wake the baby.”

  Atara whispered into Mila’s ear, “We’re safe. We’re on a passenger train, we’re going to Paris to live.”

  Mila whispered back, “Do you believe I saw the Rebbe on the train?” Her tone was urgent, as if she feared her memories, too, might be left behind.

  Atara hesitated. “But if the Rebbe was there, how come there was no miracle?”

  Mila pulled away and leaned her head against the window. “I saw him. He was wearing a white coat. He never looked up from his book but I saw him.”

  Mila fell back asleep. Her head bounced against the rattling pane. Atara tilted Mila, gently, until Mila’s head came to rest on Atara’s shoulder. Atara listened to the compartment’s door clicking in and out of its socket: her first sliding door, her first blue bulb casting shadows on Zalman’s beard, and everything she would encounter now would be a first, the conductor’s strange accent—she looked to Zalman to make sure he had not noticed her excitement, she looked into the speeding night.

  They changed trains in Oradea and Budapest; they crossed the Austro-Hungarian border, which, a few months later, would shut for forty years. They changed trains in Vienna. As the stations went by—Linz, Munich, Stuttgart—cities, towns, villages emptied of Jews, Zalman and Hannah recited psalms that streaked their cheeks.

  Paris

  THE STERNS moved into a fourth-floor apartment on the rue de Sévigné, in the Marais, the Jewish quarter. Mila and Atara still shared a room but now had separate beds. Their first night apart, they placed a chair between the two brass frames for their joined hands to rest on, so they would not uncouple in sleep.

  “Françoise!” a voice called across the courtyard and the girls’ fingers gripped as they sounded the new vowels, “Françoise,” and once again they practiced their new address in the qua-tri-ème ar-ron-dis-sement.…

  Sound by sound, the neighborhood fell asleep. The girls, too, were drifting off when they heard Zalman leave the master bedroom. Rather than settle into his study, as he would many nights in Sibiu, Zalman walked down the long hallway stacked with moving crates. The kitchen door scraped open and closed.

  Swish, the blade skimmed the whetstone, swish swish … a high-pitched blade for circumcision, and lower-pitched ones for animal slaughter … swish … swish.…

  The girls squeezed each other’s hands, to see if the other was hearing. Zalman was sharpening his ritual knives by the kitchen sink. Surely this was not something the Law asked of him, not right away, not in the middle of the night. It must have been Zalman himself who needed to do this. Swish … swish … the knives accelerated and he breathed intently … or was it their own breaths the girls were hearing?

  The sounds stopped. Zalman retraced his steps along the crates. A drawer in his secretary slid open, then the key of the secretary turned in its lock, and the girls’ hands, heavy with sleep, let go of each other.

  Swallows singing new French songs woke them. Atara opened the window. Mila leaned into the light as it poured down silver roofs and cast ringlets of shade on peeling shutters. The younger children’s laughter in the next room almost drowned out the bolt of the front door clicking open and shut; Zalman leaving for morning services. The girls tiptoed past the dining room where the flowered oilcloth still released its travel folds, they tiptoed into the master bedroom and climbed into Hannah’s bed. Soon the younger children scurried in and they all snuggled against Hannah: Mila, Atara, Schlomo, the two toddlers, and Hannah’s bed was a wide, white barge, her eiderdown a sail that steered them through the foreign morning.

  A bead of light filtered between the shutter’s slats and came to rest on Hannah’s nightcap. Little Etti tried to lift the pearl of light between thumb and index. Hannah laughed. When the baby whimpered in his crib, Hannah said, “Milenka, my eldest, will you know how to carry, carefully, little Mendel Wolf?” Mila leapt out of bed, leaned over the crib, lifted the baby. Hannah unbuttoned the top of her night shift. The children watched the tiny fists closing on Hannah’s breast, the tiny, avid lips; once more, they settled in their warm hollows.

  Zalman returned from services and Hannah hurried out of the room. Zalman sighed as he placed his black hat on the coatrack. Lingering in the warmth of Hannah’s bed, the children heard the note of anguish in his voice. He told Hannah about the congregation: Would ther
e be anyone with whom Zalman would share again the passion of Torah study he had shared with Mila’s father? How far they had come from the Rebbe’s court—there a Jew felt alive!

  At breakfast, still perplexed by the new French bread, Schlomo insisted every hole in his slice be filled with butter. “Please, Atara, this one too! It’s looking at me—”

  Zalman entered the room; Schlomo fell silent. Zalman took his seat at the head of the table and sighed.

  Schlomo watched the butter sink downward into his bread. He reached for the knife, trying to spread even more onto the slice. Giving up on the knife, he scooped the butter with a finger and squashed it into a hole. Atara suppressed a giggle. Schlomo looked up, reproachfully.

  Zalman’s fist thumped the table.

  “Goyim can’t control their bodily inclinations but a Jew thinks of God’s will only!”

  The children stilled.

  Zalman turned to his eldest son. “Nu? When the Lord tells Israel You shall be a holy nation, what does holy mean?”

  “Separate,” Schlomo replied. “It is written in the Midrash Rabbah that holy means separate.”

  “Good. You shall be a holy nation, you shall set yourself apart. As we wander through this Parisian wilderness, remember: When we Jews behave like other nations, God punishes us.” His tone grew sharper. “Surely the messiah should be here after all that we have endured, but some among us are holding the messiah back.”

  Etti started to whimper.

  “In the so-called Jewish school where, alas, I am sending you, you may hear—God forbid, you may hear—of a blasphemy that calls itself Jewish Enlightenment. But the Chassam Sofer says the Torah forbids innovation. You may hear of Enlightenment’s sinister offshoot: Zionism. Our Rebbe says Zionism was responsible for the terrible destruction. A Zionist army will protect us?” Zalman’s fist slammed the table.