On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “Yes,” he said. She could tell he was smiling at her from the warmth in his voice, the way the s was drawn out. She had known when the children lied from the sound of their voices. Couldn’t Yidel tell when she was lying? Perhaps he needed new batteries for his hearing aids. Tomorrow, she’d buy some. She pulled away from his warm hand, reached forward, and turned out the lamp.

  “You are a good man, Yidel,” she said. He untucked his sheet and blanket and tossed the edges onto her bed. He fell asleep quickly with his face against her back, his knees tucked under hers.

  No words distracted her now. No rush of grandchildren demanding drinks and succor. No husband with warm and gentle hands. There was nothing in the room with her except the loneliness of knowledge. Soon, there would be a time when, like it or not, the whole family would know that she was pregnant, not just with one baby but with twins. Such recklessness, they would think. Didn’t that poor excuse for a mother fear for the health of those new children? Why take unnecessary risks? What kind of mother would bring a damaged child into the world if she could prevent it by exercising a little self-control? And such children, damaged children, would cause terrible problems for their older siblings. When it came time to get married, their family would be marked. More marked.

  Surie turned over in the bed and moved away from Yidel’s faint breaths. The white hairs over his lips were just visible, rising on each exhale. A stream of minute bubbles rose from deep within her and she squirmed. The baby! The babies! By what bizarre miracle of internal engineering had she fallen pregnant?

  Once, when they’d been in Florida on vacation, a little old woman in a wheelchair had loudly counted Surie’s children and then said, as Surie passed, “Oh honey, don’t you know how that happens yet?” Of course she knew how. Those times with Yidel remained as pleasurable as when they’d both been younger, more flexible, more energetic, more starved for it. When their bodies had all their parts and they were all in working order. Now, though it took longer, they still enjoyed one another. They’d adapted a little, changed positions, used a lubricant recommended by the doctor, but he had not lost his touch and neither had she. His hand between her thighs was just as exciting as the first time.

  But look where it had gotten her. On that same Florida vacation, she had seen a dolphin leap into the air and fall back with a tremendous splash. A lady with a microphone taped to her face had said that the dolphins leapt out of the water to dislodge the orange lice that were embedded in the crevices of their bodies. If only. If only.

  “Why are you awake?”

  It was as if Yidel had an antenna specifically tuned on her. He almost always knew when something worried her or even if her foot ached. The silent language at which he was so adept. But he’d missed every sign of her pregnancy: the ongoing morning sickness, the crying jags, the painful varicose veins and swollen feet, the rushes to the bathroom, the afternoon naps, the pimples, the avoidance of gefilte fish, the swollen belly, the babies’ movements, the unbearably itchy skin.

  She couldn’t tell him about the dolphins and their lice. She’d couldn’t even tell him that she’d lost the key to the clock and had to buy a replacement from an antiques dealer in Borough Park, so how could she tell him that she’d almost, not quite, prayed for a miscarriage? “I’ve been thinking about your mother,” she said instead, to blot up the silence.

  Dead Onyu, her mother-in-law, was getting older and was blind, but there was no fooling her. Every day, when Surie visited the first floor, Dead Onyu held her hand for a minute too long, clearly waiting for Surie to say something.

  “The state of her apartment. It’s getting to be too much for her. Maybe we can send down one of Tzila Ruchel’s girls to help? Miryam Chiena?”

  She needed, at least until she told Yidel, to avoid his mother.

  “But if we aren’t careful about how we do it, she’ll be so hurt, and then your father will be upset and you know what happens when he gets upset.”

  Dead Opa, Surie’s father-in-law, used words, swear words, from before the time such language became unacceptable in the community, and his voice would be so loud that the neighbors could hear and sometimes there was talk. She snorted, thinking of the far worse talk there’d be when news of the pregnancy got out.

  “The walls are stained with soot from her candles. The lampshades are literally made from spiderwebs and dust.”

  “No spiders, I hope.” Yidel’s voice was sleepy. He rolled closer to her and pressed his chin against her shoulder.

  “No. Yes. There are. Lots. I saw her vacuuming one up the other morning, thinking it was a bit of yarn. She told me she doesn’t understand it. She thinks the vacuum is malfunctioning because she keeps on feeling these same bits of yarn all over the place.”

  “She touches the spiders?”

  He tickled the nape of her neck. His body was very warm, lying against hers. Would it be so terrible if he found out? Yes! It shouldn’t happen like this! Despite how confused she felt, her body began to respond.

  But when he lifted the hem of her nightgown, she pulled away from him. She wasn’t ready. She was too tired. She had a headache. The truth was this: If he lay against her, hip to hip, he’d know she was five months pregnant. Fat in the belly was soft. A child, children in the belly were not. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking when she put his hand on her skin. She hadn’t allowed him to touch her for two months, the longest they’d ever gone. Yidel looked like he might cry.

  They lay on their backs with their eyes open, staring through the darkness at the pale plaster rose on the ceiling. Spreading behind it was a water stain that looked like a map of Europe. They’d told each other that one damp patch looked like Romania. Hungary, Romania, Hungary, Romania again. Who knew which country their homeplace belonged to now. Sighet was on the border with Ukraine, they’d said, pointing. Yidel’s father and mother had lived in Sighet before the Asten displaced persons camp in Austria, before Brooklyn. Half of the population was Jewish, eight thousand individuals. Now, no Jews lived there, but that didn’t stop Dead Onyu and Dead Opa from wishing, daily, to return. But what could they see if they did return? They were both blind.

  The Tisa River, as real to Yidel and Surie as the East River, appeared as a dark brown streak between the stain that was Ukraine and the stain that was Romania.

  After a long silence, Yidel said, “What would have become of us if there hadn’t been a Holocaust? Would I have married you? Would our children have been born?”

  Surie wouldn’t have been born. Her mother had given birth to Surie at an age when most of her friends had long stopped. She had told Surie that each child she gave birth to after the Holocaust was a poke in Hitler’s eye, may his memory be erased. It was strange to think that her mother, at thirty-five, had been considered old. What would her mother have thought of Surie?

  She and Yidel could almost see mayflies hovering in their great mating dance over the Tisa. The blue blush of dawn crept up over the walls. From somewhere nearby came the unearthly sound of the huge crane in the Navy Yard turning on its axle.

  Half a block from their house, Division crossed Kent to dead-end at the East River. Surie’s three youngest sons, waiting for their yeshiva buses, often wandered down to sit on the railing and swing their feet and throw pebbles and Popsicle sticks into the river. The water was the color and texture of avocado skin. There might be a man, a stranger, not one of them, sleeping in an abandoned car. There usually was. The board fences of Certified Lumber were covered with graffiti. In the backyard, the chickens screamed their egg-laying screams. Passing boats blew their horns. In the room directly underneath theirs, Tzila Ruchel’s newborn woke up from the chiming of the big clock and began to cry. At their front door, black plastic bags awaited pickup by trucks with great rounded shoulders. On warm days, the river smelled of ashes and decomposing fish. That morning, Monday, it smelled like the thick scales that formed on the top of a baby’s head, a combination of sweat and oil and exhaustion.

  What
a place to bring up a child! But she had done it for thirty years and never thought twice about it until this moment. Images came to her of the first time she had given birth in this house, the room dim, smelling of freshly dug earth, of rain and mold and forest, of growing things. She had thought she would die that night. She remembered Dead Onyu’s tears at the appearing and disappearing sliver of infant scalp, and how she had wanted to push then, had wanted to see the face of her child, and she remembered when her mother-in-law put the raw child into her arms and kissed her and the child turned its head and began to suck. She remembered it as if it were happening right then and she cried the same tears she’d cried then, of wonder and fear and pain and something cold and thin and silvery that she had no name for, and she put up her hand to touch her breasts, but both were gone to the cancer and so she placed her hand on her chest instead and her fingers walked the thick, curving scars.

  Her chest had been tingling and sore for months. She had not chosen to do reconstruction. Even if she had, she would not be able to nurse the new babies, but the surgeon must have left something behind, some cells that knew she was pregnant. She remembered waiting for the school bus on the corner of Kent and Division, wearing a heavy woolen coat that she had wrapped around the heads of her five children to protect them, the pressure of their small skulls against her thighs and her belly, the redbrick cobblestones, the wind. The children chanting, “Der roite godeh! Der roite godeh!” The street made of red bricks. She had thought she should remember the moment. Had known it was something worth remembering.

  The emptiness in the house when they were all at school, the unbearable ticking of the clock, the almost explosive chimes. She remembered sitting on the lip of the bath in the middle of the night with the shower running, her son Lipa coughing and blue from croup, the steam smelling of mildewed socks and fear gnawing at her as a rat gnaws at a steel garbage bin. She remembered the lines of diapers flapping in the wind on the top of the building, her children playing “ships” in the empty laundry baskets, and she, pregnant again, stretching, bending, pegging out an endless row of wet linen.

  She put her legs over the edge of the bed and lifted herself into the semidarkness. She was so tired. Even first thing in the morning, her ankles were swollen and her legs burned. Outside, it was still raining and raindrops glistened, caught in the mesh of the screen. From beyond the window, there was an almost constant sound similar to the scraping of chairs. Every so often, a metallic crash as something was let fall. Who knew what they did in the Navy Yard these days? Once, it had been the city’s car pound lot. Now, it was businesses she didn’t know anything about. A film studio, they whispered in the butcher shop. In the kitchen, she lit the fire under the kettle and began toasting bread for her youngest sons, still unmarried and living at home, seventeen, fifteen, and thirteen, all of whom she had borne in her forties, the greatest risks she thought she’d ever take.

  How will I manage? she asked the toaster and the kettle and the stainless-steel sink.

  Tomorrow morning, they replied, you will tell Yidel and he will be so happy and surprised. He won’t be angry or hurt or sad. He will cook so you build the babies properly, and he will make you suck umeboshi plums so you do not vomit so much. He will ask Tzila Ruchel to send her girls up to help you in the house, to clean, to sweep. Dead Onyu will stand in the street in the morning, waiting for the cheder buses with the little children. Yidel will buy pressure stockings for your tired legs, and when you are resting, he will massage your feet and feed you calcium for the cramps.

  “The cramps,” she said, and she shuddered.

  She did not wish to remember her last birth, which had gone badly, very badly, and taken many days. She did not wish to remember the way she had put her hands around the midwife’s neck and screamed that she wanted to go to the hospital. There had been a blizzard and the midwife had come in covered with snow, wheeling an oxygen tank. It left thin black lines of wetness on the wooden floors that did not dry.

  The work required to sustain life in the world! Was it doubled for twins? She did not have the energy even for one newborn. No matter how she tried to distract herself, her mind circled back again and again.

  In Romania, there had been small caves on the banks of the Tisa, and within the caves, if you dared to climb inside with a flashlight, you could see drawings made of ocher, of cows and lions and bears. Dead Onyu, as a fifteen-year-old girl, had climbed into one of these caves with her sister and that is how they had been missed when everyone from their town had been rounded up. The paintings weren’t old. They had been the work of local schoolboys, one of whom was Dead Opa. He had also hidden in a cave. Now both of them were blind from when the flame in their portable gas heater had blown out while Yidel and Surie were in California. The old people had nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning. As if losing Lipa weren’t enough punishment.

  At six, Surie’s youngest three sons came into the kitchen from the mikva, pulling off their long coats. They washed their hands in silence and sat down to toast and eggs and coffee. Their jackets were wet from the rain. They wore plastic shopping bags over their beaver felt hats. They smelled like damp wool and spray starch. Through the closed window, she could hear the wind buffeting between the buildings, howling down the passageways from the Wallabout Channel and, before that, from the East River. Gulls rode the wind, cawing.

  Somewhere, in the future, were two new children, maybe boys like these ones. Instead of almost sixty, feeding teenagers, she would be almost eighty. The new children would be ashamed of her, of her terrible age, of her frailty, of the way she still used occasional Hungarian words even though their friends’ parents all spoke pure Yiddish. They wouldn’t bring their classmates home to taste her kokosh cake. She would look and sound and think like Dead Onyu and Dead Opa. To distract herself from this image, she stood still, trying to remember all that the midwife had told her about the pregnancy and the births. Val’s hoarse smoker’s voice, trying to be friendly, failing:

  You know this already, but most babies are born headfirst, Mrs. Eckstein. If they come with their feet first, it is known as a breech. It’s far more common with twins. Don’t you remember what happened with your third kid? I don’t have to tell you what labor feels like. You know better than me! Even if the cramping is tolerable, usually the sensation during crowning, when the baby’s head is delivered, feels very intense. Burning. You won’t have too many problems with that. We already know you know how to push them out. That last one, you screamed. It’s best not to scream. Moaning is okay with me. My ears, I’m getting old, know what I mean?

  Never, during any of the births before her youngest son, Chaim Tzvi, had Surie screamed or even moaned. She had endured, the best that could be said of the experience. She had traveled, in her mind, to the place where Dead Onyu had played in the river, a river quite unlike the East River. The Tisa was unpolluted, shallow at its edges, and except during the spring melt, children could stand with their feet in the water and a small net in their hands and try to catch the minnows that swam just below the surface. Tiny yellow snails crawled over their feet, and long, pale green weeds twisted around their ankles. When Chaim Tzvi’s head crowned after three days of labor, Surie was plunging into the icy water of the Tisa, making a victorious shout as a net full of squirming fish was held aloft.

  * * *

  At sixteen, a newly married Surie had come to live in the three-flat apartment building of Dead Onyu and Dead Opa. And still sixteen, she had her first child, a son. Dead Onyu, a young and sassy thirty-eight, had just given birth to her seventeenth child a few days earlier, so she wasn’t available to assist. “Your family is keeping me hopping,” Val had said to Dead Onyu. It had been Val’s first year in Williamsburg and she didn’t have a handle on the community at all. “You’d think an old pro like you would know how to avoid this by now,” she’d said. “Don’t you think it’s time to give it a rest? Haven’t you shown Hitler enough times that you won’t be killed?”

  During h
er labor with Chaim Tzvi, Val had told her she should make sounds. Heck, she could go ahead and scream if she thought it would help. Sweat broke out under Surie’s turban and streamed from her body. The midwife had encouraged Surie to moo or bellow or cry. Something. Anything. But Surie had remained silent until almost the very end. “What is it with you women?” Val had asked.

  Surie, laboring with that tenth child, paced from the living room at the front of her apartment all the way down the narrow hall to the back bedroom, where four of the five older boys were sleeping. She’d always hoped to have seven sons and gain free admittance to Paradise. Around and around she went. She stood in front of the big clock, each tick running through her like electricity, and she’d begged her long-dead mother to ask for divine intervention. From downstairs came the crying of Tzila Ruchel’s new infant, Surie’s first grandchild, the oldest daughter of her oldest daughter. Tzila Ruchel had gone to the hospital. She’d wanted a doctor.

  Returning to the midwife after several circuits, Surie had said, “Why should I scream, why should I moan, when I am doing the exact thing I was made for? When I am fulfilling my part in creation? Thank God, I know my place in the world. The Torah speaks about many things, but always, always it talks about the children that come forth, the children that one is to sacrifice for. Every part of my life is turned towards children, the having of children, the raising of children.

  “The strollers standing in the synagogue on yontiff, they are the Jewish people. And the yellow school buses that clog the streets in the morning, that is the Jewish people. And all of the crying babies under their father’s white prayer shawls during the priestly blessing, that is the Jewish people. Their small hands, their feet, their shaven heads, their long curling payos, the singsong of their voices, at the end of the Holocaust when we thought no children were left, the sound of one child’s cry was enough to fill every heart to overflowing. Families that didn’t have money for blankets had money enough to bear children because that was the true and only wealth of the Jewish people. When the nations of the world say that we have stolen all the riches, there is no denying it, for aren’t our places of worship full of gems, and aren’t our schools full of diamonds, and aren’t all the beds in our homes filled with gold and silver and onyx? When they say we have the blood of Christian children in our matzos, it is not true. We have the blood of Jewish children in our matzos. We have the blood of Jewish children in the air we breathe. It is all that we live for.”