The milk in the children’s bowls lifted in curls that collapsed over the rims and onto the oilcloth.
Etti burst into sobs.
Zalman’s brow furrowed. His pulse galloped. It was essential for children to fear their father so they would grow into God-fearing Jews. His voice rose above the toddler’s sobs.
“Who are we to stand up to the nations when God wills us to submit? Who are we to build a Jewish state when God decrees our exile? God made us swear three oaths.” Zalman turned to his eldest son. “What is the first?”
Schlomo hesitated. Zalman scanned the other children’s faces but they did not know.
“The first oath: That we will not storm the wall of exile. The second: That we will not rebel against the nations amongst whom we are exiled. The third: That we will not force the End.
“We must not build the Promised Land with our own strength. Our deliverance will come through wonders and miracles and whoever doubts this miraculous redemption doubts the entire Torah. May HaShem free us from the enemies that surround us, may He deliver us from exile, Amen.”
“Amen,” the children echoed.
Zalman rose and treaded heavily toward the door.
THAT AFTERNOON, flying over the slide’s hump in the Luxembourg Gardens, it was hard for the children to remember they were wandering in the desert; soaring in the boat-shaped swings, it was hard to remember they were chosen to set themselves apart. When the children did remember, they shrilled louder plummeting down the slide and tore back up as if this descent might be the last before they were gathered out of exile. Mothers on benches shook their heads. Surely this brood with sidecurls and long skirts was the loudest the Luxembourg had ever heard.
“Why so much joy in the wilderness?” Zalman reprimanded when the children clambered up the flights home, cheeks flushed with play. “Where do you think the Jewish children are, who lived here before you? Which of our neighbors handed them over? ”
In Sibiu, Zalman had tolerated that his sons toss marbles in the yard, but he no longer permitted it in Paris. “Bitul z’man” (waste of time), he scolded the boys who followed him to his study, ears crimson from his angry clip. Girls were permitted to jump rope or play hopscotch when Hannah did not need help, but boys old enough to read were to sit in front of the holy books.
Mila and Atara could sense that Zalman, so valiant in the desolation of back there, was afraid of Paris. They wanted to reassure him. They vowed that their piety would console the ilui who had lost his world. At the close of the Sabbath, when women were not expected to attend services, they accompanied him to synagogue. Like Zalman, they stepped down the curb to avoid coming near a place of idol worship, a church. Like him, they turned their eyes from the graven images that adorned façades and fountains—had God saved their bodies so their souls might perish? Zalman seized the girls’ hands before crossing the street, that is, he wrapped his palms around their wrists, slowed them with a tighter clasp. Zalman touched his children so rarely that his firm hold circling their wrists filled the girls with an exquisite sense of protectedness. Sometimes Zalman forgot to let go when they reached the opposite sidewalk and then it did not matter if people stared and knew he was their father, the Jew with the untrimmed beard who would not shake women’s hands; it did not matter if someone snickered sales juifs, dirty Jews. Zalman leaned toward the girls. “The same clothes that point us out to the hatred of the Goyim also point us out to Him who dwells in Heaven.”
Swish … the knives skimmed the whetstone.
Swish … the girls’ jump rope whisked the corridor’s floorboards.
Zalman stepped out of the kitchen, the blades’ gleam secure behind felt cloth. Pressed against the wallpaper, Mila and Atara knew not to upset his course. When the door of his study closed, their skipping resumed, solemn, as the ancient desert threat cast its shadow and flew past.
THE CHILDREN were in the entryway, preparing to leave for their first day of school, when Zalman emerged from his study. The girls bit their lips, afraid to be late.
“You will watch over yourselves,” he instructed, “and you will watch over one another. If the puppets of Satan gather to celebrate their new mirage, their State of Israel, you will stand apart, separate. Blimela, you are the eldest”—Zalman always called Mila by her Yiddish name—“you will watch over the younger ones.” Mila nodded. “Remember, Blimela, when you observe HaShem’s commandments, your parents’ souls, up there, come nearer to His presence, but when you stray, they are banished to a cold desert where souls freeze and shatter.”
Mila closed her eyes to better see her parents depending on her for warmth.
“The children will be late,” Hannah whispered to Zalman.
“The Lord is giving us one more chance. May He free us from the enemies that surround us, may He deliver us from exile, Amen.”
“Amen,” the children echoed, adjusting the shoulder straps of their schoolbags.
The bell was ringing when they entered the yard. Mila and Atara dropped off their younger siblings with the nursery-school teacher and ran to join the line already disappearing into the main building. They marveled at being in the same grade even though Mila was almost one year older and had finished first grade in Sibiu, but Zalman could obtain only one segregated class; the school of heretics permitted that boys and girls study together.
Tall windows took up one wall of the bright room. The teacher stood in front of a lined blackboard; she was pretty even though she wore pants. They must not tell Zalman about the pants. Children’s paintings of blue stars on white paper were taped in a continuous frieze on the remaining two walls.
Mila and Atara were shown two empty desks in the back of the room. Some of the children turned their heads and smiled, others leaned close together and whispered.
Every morning, the girls’ eyes shone when they opened their cahiers d’école, notebooks with pages white, smooth, ruled and cross-ruled by pale blue lines. They dipped their new pens into the glass inkwell, how lovely it was to trace, meticulously, the new French words, the ascenders and descenders.
THE TEACHER announced there would be a celebration of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Mila looked up, to the frieze of blue stars. Her nib caught and scratched the paper, spitting a drop of ink on the white page. Once again, the two girls would be set apart. Mila flushed when she remembered that three times already Atara and she had been the designated robbers during recess. Their classmates’ war cries encircled them, and Atara and she cowered against each other, then fled inside the building where pupils were not allowed during recess. The pretty teacher came down the stairs in her pants. Atara and Mila lowered their eyes, ashamed to tell that their classmates ganged up on them. The teacher looked at them lengthily, at their long skirts, their thick stockings. She asked whether it was true that their father would not permit them to study for the baccalauréat, later. The girls answered they did not know, they did not know what the bacca—what it was.
Atara stared at the spot of ink on Mila’s page.
Mila whispered, “We must find out when the celebration will take place.”
“Quiet!” the teacher called.
If they could find out the exact day, surely Zalman and Hannah would let them stay home—Zalman would want them to stay home.
THE BLUE Star of David fluttered in the bright May sky, above the classes assembled in the schoolyard. At a second-floor window, holding a megaphone, the principal gave an impassioned speech: There were lessons surviving Jews must learn from history and one such lesson was that powerlessness was not an option. The euphoric voice bounced out of the Zionist megaphone. “No longer next year but this year—this year in our new State of Israel!”
The yard roared. Teachers and students joined hands. A classmate reached for Atara’s hand, to invite the two girls in the giant round, but Mila and Atara shook their heads and pressed harder into the back wall, to meld into it, even as their eyes did not lift from the linked hands and stamping feet, even as their ears
could not help but learn the most prohibited of songs: Our hope is not yet lost, to be a free nation in our land.…
But boys and girls holding hands, singing together, dancing together, celebrating the End when the End had not come—all of it was forbidden.
Walking home, Mila and Atara were silent. All week, Mila could not look Zalman in the eyes. She begged God to examine her heart and see that she had not intended to force the End. She, Mila Heller, would wait, patiently, to be saved.
*
HANNAH and Zalman hired Leah Bloch, a nineteen-year-old seminary graduate, to foil the traps of the impious école and give the girls additional instruction on modesty and religious observance. Pale, thin-lipped Leah Bloch, who fantasized that the new Hasidic family from afar was hers, instead of her own ordinary French family, explained that Mila and Atara must be proud of their lineage, of parents who were not dupes of the French lumières. She taught the girls to read Scripture the proper way—never the words of Scripture alone, but always accompanied by the revered commentators’ interpretations. She sang fervent, pious songs to counter the songs the girls were hearing in school. Every Sabbath afternoon, Leah Bloch and the girls danced to the tune: “I want the messiah, now!”
Leah Bloch informed Hannah about Mila and Atara not partaking in the forbidden celebration. Zalman called the girls into his study. He looked at one then the other; he smiled. “Nu?” Every afternoon that week, he taught them to sing in harmony a passage from the Days of Awe services, a difficult prayer tune he had been teaching the boys who would accompany him in synagogue, but Mila and Atara had fine voices even if they could not sing in public, not in front of men. Mila was not yet twelve so she could sing in front of Zalman despite not being his daughter.
*
EAGER to assume responsibilities beyond tutoring the girls, Leah Bloch ran errands for Hannah and took the children to the park. When Leah Bloch held the hands of the younger siblings, Mila and Atara could sprint ahead, over the arcing bridges, to the gold-tipped arrows of the Luxembourg’s gates.
And so it was that one radiant Sabbath afternoon, Mila and Atara entered the gardens alone. Giddy leaves peeked out of every bud, on every tree.
The girls dashed forward.
“Aha!” the combed gravel let out.
The rusticated columns of the Palais du Luxembourg folded inside the pond’s ripples, swirled around the fountain, vanished into droplets of water-sun—
“Atara! Mila!”
Across the terrace, straddling her bicycle, the girls’ new playground friend, Nathalie, waved. “You want it for a lap?” she yelled.
Mila and Atara ran to the bicycle. Mila straddled the frame; Atara perched on the rear rack.
“One lap only!” Nathalie called after them.
Mila’s right foot weighed down on the pedal, the left foot weighed down. The spokes cast their spinning shadows as the bike overtook the toy sails in the pond. Mila leaned into a curve; Atara clasped Mila’s waist. Mila pedaled faster; Atara’s arms flew up. Mila slowed by the sandpit where toddlers rapped each other’s heads with plastic spades—on a bicycle, even decelerating was a thrill. Mila’s shoe slipped on the pedal and the bicycle tipped to one side; Atara leaned to the other side and the bike regained its enchanted balance.
The other shoe slipped on the pedal, the leather sole of Mila’s black patent Sabbath shoe—
Surely there had been no bicycles on Mount Sinai, Atara thought. Had there been one, then riding it would never have been forbidden on the day of rest, because it wasn’t work at all and one was meant to rejoice on the Sabbath—“My turn now!” Atara called.
Mila slowed and the girls switched positions. Atara stood up on the pedals. Flowers and hedges blurred past as she accelerated. Children’s cries speckled the air, soared with the swings, bounced on the slide’s hump—
A shriek.
Tearing across the lawn, Leah Bloch, followed by the toddlers.
Atara braked. The back wheel skidded.
“Sabbath!” Leah Bloch screamed with all her might.
Mila and Atara tumbled off the bicycle before it fully stopped.
“You’re still touching it!” Leah Bloch cried out.
Atara let go of the bike, which fell to the ground.
“Sabbath!” Leah Bloch let out again. “You must tell your father, you must tell him what you did on the Sabbath.”
Mila remembered that if Jews kept one Sabbath only, if they kept one Sabbath perfectly, the messiah would come and her parents would live again. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Atara went to look for Nathalie while the bike lay on the gravel. Atara tried to explain: No, she had not fallen off the bike, no, neither Mila nor she was hurt, no, she could not bring the bike back—she could not touch it.
Mila and Atara left the Luxembourg through a gate they had not taken before. Would Zalman find out? Someone from the congregation might have seen the new rabbi’s children transgressing the Sabbath.… Would Leah Bloch tell? A sibling? The girls wandered along the quays, far, until hoarse seagull calls carved the setting sun. They reasoned that eight and seven was too young to run away. Hair bows limp to the sides of their faces, they began to retrace their steps.
Perhaps if Zalman saw them first in the synagogue, he would be less angry?
The girls lingered between the pews of the unlit women’s balcony.
Soon Zalman stood in the doorway; Zalman would not enter the balcony even though no grown woman was there. He signaled to the girls. They advanced. Atara was closest to him; one spank sent her flying down the vestibule’s three steps. “Go home!”
Zalman had never spanked his children.
The girls made their way home.
Hannah turned from them.
In their Sabbath dark room—it was forbidden to flick a switch and turn on a light on the Sabbath—the girls sat on the same bed.
Zalman came back from evening services somber, intent. He lit the braided candle, poured wine to the brim of the silver goblet—to inherit this world and the next.
“Where are they, the transgressors of the Sabbath?” he asked.
“In their room,” a child whispered.
“Go fetch them. A God-fearing Jew is obligated to hear Havdala.”
The girls appeared, gazes cast down. Zalman intoned the prayer that separates Sabbath from weekday, sacred from profane. When he finished, the room was silent. Mila started for the kitchen, for the sink full of dirty Sabbath dishes.
“Stay!” Zalman commanded.
He slid off his belt.
Mila froze in the doorway.
Atara plunged under the daybed.
Zalman pulled the bed from the wall.
Atara swerved to maintain cover.
The bed jerked right, left; Atara ducked right, left.
The bed lurched and seesawed and Zalman grew angrier.
“You’re only making matters worse! Get out of there!”
Atara stilled. Zalman’s hand reached for her, his yad chazakah molded on God’s own mighty hand. He dragged the girl out, bent her over his knee, pulled down her pajamas.
Even toddlers did not crawl naked in Zalman’s house.
“My child mocks God’s word in public? ”
The belt lashed the air and Atara’s buttocks. Her legs wriggled, trying to escape, but her feet did not reach the ground.
“A profaner of the Sabbath—a man who gathers sticks on the Sabbath, all the congregation shall stone him!”
Mila shuddered with each blow.
“Stop, Tatta, stop!” the children sobbed.
“The rebellious son, his parents must do the stoning.”
Belt belt belt.
“I will instill fear of Heaven in my children.”
Belt. Belt. Belt.
“Zalman! Isn’t it enough?” Hannah pleaded.
“Do not intervene! I will break secularism.” Belt. “Zionism.” Belt. “Modernity.” Belt.
Atara was no longer screaming.
“Repeat after me: Never again will I transgress the Sabbath, not the Sabbath nor any of the Lord’s Holy Days.”
The girl hiccuped the commanded words.
Zalman let go of her.
She slid under the daybed. Zalman rose and took a step toward Mila, coiled belt in hand. Anger dented and swelled his forehead.
He saw the spreading stain on Mila’s white tights and the puddle around her shoes, widening. His head turned away. His raised arm dropped to his side.
He stopped in the doorway. “You have disobeyed the Lord and you have shamed me, deeply. You have shamed the family. Now the apikorsim (nonbelievers) mock: Here goes the pious Hasid whose children transgress the Sabbath.”
Zalman left the room. In his study, head in his hands, he recited the texts affirming what he had done.
“Shush now!” Hannah said, wiping the toddlers’ noses. In the next room, the baby squealed. Hannah looked at the puddle at Mila’s feet, she hesitated. “Go, wash up, then take the younger children to bed.” The children gripped Hannah’s dress. The baby’s shrieks grew louder. Hannah pulled away but the children held on as she started for the door. She leaned over the crib, lifted the baby, paced back and forth with the baby in her arms; the sobbing children followed her back and forth. “Quiet!” Hannah said. “Your father and I are trying to protect you— Mila,” she called to the next room, “get a hold of yourself. I need your help.” Hannah leaned sideways and wiped more noses. “It’s important to watch over one another, to shield one another from sin. It’s important not to encourage wickedness—the baby is hungry, let go of my dress. No one will punish you if you say no to your evil inclination. Mila! Now, I need help now! Put the children to bed and say HaMapil with them. I’ll see to Atara.”
I Am Forbidden Page 5