Yidel knocked at the door.
“Surie? I want to lie down. I’m very tired.”
When Val unlocked the door, he looked at the midwife with surprise. He remembered her, of course, from Purim and from earlier, from the births of all of their children.
“She checked my heart. It’s been fluttery all day,” Surie said. He was wearing his hearing aids now. “She’s just leaving.”
Val frowned at Surie. The midwife passed a hand over her face. She pressed her fingers into the corners of her lips. She put her giant hands on her hips.
“Tell him,” Val said. Tell him. Tell him.
“Tell me what?” Yidel asked.
“About the pregnant girl,” Surie interrupted. Now that the moment had come, she wanted to tell Yidel about the twins in private. It wasn’t something to share with Val or anyone else. “I know I wasn’t supposed to talk about her at all. Confidentiality. But I had to say something. It was killing me.”
Val passed her hand over her face again. “Rabbi Eckstein, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to keep what you heard about the Shnitzer girl a secret. Can you do that?”
Yidel looked from Val to Surie. Her face was bright red and she was glaring at Val and the midwife was furious too.
“Don’t come in to the hospital tomorrow. Call me.”
“Fantastic,” Surie said flatly. She brought up a hoarse kind of laugh.
Val said goodbye and edged past Yidel.
He waited until after he heard Val’s footsteps going down the stairs before saying, “Don’t lock the door when you are in a room with her. That lady is weird. I don’t trust her. I can’t believe you agreed to work with her every day. And would you please, please stop that laughing.” He rolled over on his side and looked at Surie. “You’re not … you wouldn’t … you two aren’t…?” He shivered. “This world…,” he said. “We need the Messiah.”
Surie put her face down into her pillow and wept from frustration.
Yidel slipped out to sit with Dead Opa. After an hour, he came back to check on her. She was half-asleep, murmuring. Did she need anything? She wasn’t looking so well. Her face was covered in sweat and the quilt, over her chest, was trembling. How was her heart? He came to her bedside and took her hand, feeling for her pulse, though she made no response. He said, very softly, that he would return soon and then he went away. Surie, in her fitful sleep, knew he had visited, but had not fully opened her eyes because she had been talking to Lipa.
For the last month, on the bus and walking over the bridge and washing the dishes, she’d imagined herself sitting in the park listening to the chittering of the squirrels, a bright new double stroller and two clean babies in front of her, Lipa once again at her side. In those dreams, she’d been young and her back didn’t hurt and she never had aching legs. It was a measure of pride to her as a mother that she had somehow dredged from deep within herself this trembling flame of happiness. She’d dreamed, over and over, of telling Yidel and of his whoop of joy, the way he’d swagger around the neighborhood telling his friends that he, a man in his sixties, was to be a father. And of twins.
But she’d also dreamed about the clinic, working there, studying the textbook at lunchtime and taking the tests for lay midwives, attending her first birth, delivering a Chassidic woman and giving the instructions in Yiddish.
Now, she was trapped in a nightmare. Her darkest fears, terrors that came upon her late at night, rose up and papered the walls of her bedroom. Both babies had Down syndrome. They lacked brains. They were fused together, two heads on one body, alive but monstrous. She died in labor. The babies died in labor. There was blood, so much blood. Even after she told everyone that she was pregnant, no one believed her. People talked about her as if she were crazy. They left brochures for Bellevue in the vestibule.
Her children were furious at her. Medical skeletons danced in her closets, jeering at her ignorance. Val grew to twice her actual size and snarled with a mouthful of polished marble teeth that had been filed into points. Gravel dust coated every surface of her house. Women walked past her windows, crying for help, but she was trapped in her bedroom. Yidel believed she’d been unfaithful. He thought she’d sinned with the Satan. Her beloved husband cried himself to sleep every night and never touched her again.
FIFTEEN
She had once asked Dead Onyu if the customs were different in Romania and the old woman had frowned, remembering:
Before the holiday, my father took the goose to the shochet and the butcher took out his long knife and said the prayer and slit the goose’s neck, and then my mother and I sat and plucked the feathers into a pillowcase, a new pillow for my dowry, and then we kashered the bird on wooden planks drilled full of holes, and we sprinkled it with handfuls of salt we’d gathered at the seaside, and then, when it was ready, we stripped all of the fat from the meat and boiled it down and the best treat of all was the gribbenes, the fried pieces of fat, after all of the liquid had come out of it, and we children would fight over them, and if you had one piece, you would get married in four years and if you had two, you’d get married in two years, but if you had five pieces, it meant you would get married that very year.
When the matchmaker strolled through the village without his umbrella, it meant he was going to talk with Shifra Leah, the baker, but if he strolled through the village with his black umbrella, it meant he was going to speak about a match and all of the children would hide behind the little blue picket fences and watch to see where he was going. And afterward, if we heard laughter, we knew there would be a wedding. And if we heard crying there might be a wedding too but it would be a poor one and there wouldn’t be any fat herring.
The Rebbetzin wore a crown made of silk and pearls and gold embroidery and all of the women made it for her. The silk came up the river on a barge and was sold at the market, and my mother was the one who bought it, many yards, because of the many pleats that would be sewn into the cloth, and my aunt bought the fine gold wire and my grandmother cut the pearls off her own pearl necklace and they asked me to draw the design for the embroidery because all day I drew flowers and ferns and swords and lions into the dirt. I was so proud to be chosen. I was ten.
Before Rosh Hashanah, my brothers went to the river and peeled strips of bark from the willow trees there, and then they wound them into the shape of shofars, and they ran around the village, blowing them and making crazy sounds from these little trumpahten and the fathers would chase them and try to grab them away, and it was the only time the boys could run from their fathers and not expect to get a smack on the bottom.
I was afraid, the first time I went to get my father from the synagogue on the late afternoon before Yom Kippur. My father knelt on the floor in his white kittel, his beard folded on the parquet, and my uncle beat his shoulders with a belt, not hard, you have to understand, just taps, but still.
The girls in our family were all married with the same dowry, two feather beds, two feather blankets, six feather pillows, a dozen heavy linen sheets, four lace curtains, a sofa, twenty envelopes full of seeds for the garden, ten good laying hens, and a bookshelf full of fine-printed Hebrew books. My father gave the groom a gold watch, and my mother sewed him his linen shrouds. But that was only for my sisters, because by the time I married in the DP camp, I had no parents, only one sister left of seven, no brothers, no cousins, no nieces, no nephews.
* * *
From now on, there would be no Dead Onyu by Surie’s side, sitting next to her on the holidays, listening as she spoke of her children, advising her about her life. From her place at the women’s table, Surie looked across at Yidel, sitting at the men’s table in the next room. His mouth was flapping open and shut, but she could tell that he was not singing. The expression on his face shifted between a blurred sadness and no expression at all. This pushing away of mourning an impossibility. His ancient father, Dead Opa, sat next to him, his head in his hands. The sons, the sons-in-law, the grandsons, all swayed in unison. They w
ere singing a song that their great-great-grandfather, Dead Opa’s father, had composed. In the middle of the wordless song, the overhead lights went out and they were left sitting in candlelight.
“What happened to the timer?”
“Yoish! A two-day yontiff and no lights.”
The timer, in the rush after the funeral, had remained set for a standard Shabbos. But on Shavios, the lights needed to remain on all night.
“It’s not the worst thing.”
The weak light calmed the children. They leaned together, trading secrets in whispers. Babies dozed on their mothers’ laps. The singing grew softer, warmer, and the young girls rustled on the benches and cooed like roosting birds. The littlest decided to play a game of bahaltereich. Who will be it? Eins, tsvei, drai, lozer lokker-lai, okn bokn, beiner-shtokn, onk, bonk, shtonk. They hid in the dark corners, scaring themselves, getting caught with little yelps and cries. The bigger girls jumped rope but were told to put away the shtrik. The older girls dared one another to say tongue twisters. “Can you say fir por portzelayne farfurkes?” The food was carried in and out in huge tureens, the plates whisked off the tables and replaced with clean ones. Between courses, Surie’s teenage boys washed the dishes and dried them, and as they worked, their voices rose and fell as if they were studying Gemara instead of rinsing plates. They were rehearsing the little speeches they had prepared for the long sleepless first night of the holiday. They twisted their payos between their fingers. A knife fell and landed with its point stuck in the floor. They looked at one another, said, “We have an enemy,” and burst out laughing, then hushed themselves. To rejoice? To mourn?
Small boys fought and called one of their own a liggener and dragged the liar to arbitration by the fathers. The house filled with an undercover ripple, like mice nibbling the roots of periwinkle on a warm night. A subdued sound, given away only by the almost invisible rise and fall of the leaves as the mice moved from plant to plant, by the faintest gestures among the cousins. In the flickering light of the candles, Surie looked across at Yidel again, at his gray beard and his dark eyes, and—wanting to rip up the secret that divided them—knew with the blackest certainty that she would tell him about the twins the moment he came back from the all-night reading, early the next morning, just before dawn. She would stuff the hearing aids into his ears herself if she had to. She wanted nothing more than to erase this division between them. They had made this world together. She wanted all of him. Without barriers.
That night, her sons and grandsons came in and out, picking up sheet cakes and cartons of cigarettes and carrying them back to the shil where all the men stayed up, awake, waiting for the giving of the Torah, and Surie’s daughters and daughters-in-law stayed behind for a while in the living room, telling stories of the Baal Shem Tov and not a few stories about their families and their friends, and there was hushed laughter though it was a house of mourning, for the joy of the holiday took precedence over the sadness.
Surie had carried the candelabra into the living room, and sometime close to midnight, the candles began to gutter and the room filled with the exquisite smell of extinguished beeswax. The children squealed and moved closer to their mothers.
“It’s so dark, Mommy!”
The women, over a dozen of them, were tired, drifting in the dim lighting and the late hour. The smallest girls lay sprawled on blankets on the floor, asleep, sucking their thumbs. The schoolgirls tried to play kigelach in the light coming inside from the streetlamp, their tiny hands hitting the floor, scooping up the small metal cubes, and then catching the one main cube as it fell.
“I’m going to stay up until Tatie comes home,” they said to one another, even as their eyelids drooped. And it was just like Pesach, when the littlest ones tried to stay awake for Eliyahu the prophet but couldn’t and fell asleep in their chairs and under the table.
This was the beginning of summer, the most beautiful soft nights, when the air was full of the sound of tree frogs and stars could be seen above the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the deep blue sky. The children could feel the release of some of the bonds of the year. School would end soon and many would go up to the Catskills, to bungalows and to camp. And the mothers, too, felt this release, even Surie. She looked around at the children and was filled with a deep joy that soon two more children would join them. “Tzila Ruchel,” she said, whispering in her daughter’s ear, “you’re going to have two new siblings.”
Tzila Ruchel stood up and stretched her back. “That’s nice, Mommy. I’m glad you’ve found someone for Mattis. Let me know when they are going to meet. I’ll make some fancy cakes, bli neder. Hi ho, it’s time to go downstairs,” she said. “To bed. Miryam Chiena, will you take the girls?” This was a signal to the other women that it would be permissible to go home, to say that they had stayed up long enough on Shavios night.
“No, Tzila Ruchel, that’s not what I meant,” Surie said. She leaned on the arm of the chair and levered herself up. “Wait.” She wasn’t ready for the peaceful night to end, for if there was ever a time to tell her daughter, now, when they were both so mellow, was it. “I’ll make coffee.”
All except Tzila Ruchel trickled out and Surie was left in the kitchen with her third daughter. “Let’s get the dishes put up,” she said, and they finished washing the dishes the boys hadn’t and wiped them dry and squeezed them back in the crowded cabinets. Then they took baked goods from the freezer and laid them out on the tables for the following morning. They worked quickly and in total silence. They were both tired. “There’s some left,” said Surie when the kitchen shone. She held out a pot of black coffee. “It wouldn’t do to waste it.” She sat down at the tiny kitchen table and, looking up at Tzila Ruchel, poured herself a large cup. Tzila Ruchel shook her head.
“The girls will be wondering where I am.” She took off her damp housecoat and hung it on a nail above the window to the roof.
“I wasn’t talking about Mattis,” Surie said. “I’m pregnant. Can’t you tell?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! That’s not possible!” Tzila Ruchel shook her head but then dropped her gaze and eyed Surie’s stomach. “Oy.” Tiny twitches moved across Tzila Ruchel’s face. First her eyebrow, then her nostril, then her cheek, then her lip. “Are you sure it’s not a tumor? Have you seen a doctor?”
Surie took a sip of the coffee. She pressed her shaking hands around the cup. “It’s twins.”
“Gevald! You can’t be serious. What were you thinking?” Tzila Ruchel was halfway out of the room, her feet running though her body was stationary.
“Even my doctor thinks it’s a miracle, but my daughter thinks I am revolting.”
“Mommy…”
“You do.”
“When?”
“In two months. A little less maybe.”
“Gottenyu! We’re ruined. Absolutely finished. As if Lipa wasn’t enough! If you haven’t married off Mattis by then, he’ll be unmarriageable. And what was Tatie thinking … how could he…? You’re so—”
“Old,” Surie said, right as her daughter said, “Obese.”
They stared at each other. Surie felt a terrible pain in her stomach. She tried to smile. “I’m excited,” she said. “They’ll keep me young.”
“Stop it!” Tzila Ruchel said. “Uch, it’s so disgusting! I don’t want to think about it anymore!” She backed away from Surie, who continued smiling. “I can’t even look at your face.” Would Yidel react this badly? The other married children? Surie’s lips were so dry that they began to crack.
* * *
After drinking all of the coffee, though she knew she shouldn’t, Surie cut a large wedge of chocolate cake and took a bite. She could never eat enough to satisfy the twins. On the way to her bedroom she saw, standing in the shadow in the corner under the leaking skylight, Onyu and Lipa. A drop of water fell onto the floor. Surie put out the hand that wasn’t holding the plate and it passed through Lipa’s chest. Dead Onyu opened her mouth and inside were three rows of shining metal teeth. There w
as dirt on her lips, a fur of frost on her cheeks. She smiled at Surie. “Not long now,” she said.
Lipa lifted his hand and waved. He looked again like her little boy, with his long curling payos and the suit she’d sewn for him when he was twelve. He seemed to be getting shorter as she watched. The black wall behind him shone brighter and brighter. He was a cartoon of himself, a silvery outline. He was a few scratches in the paint. He was just a faint odor. He was gone. “No!” she said. “Wait!” A fist inside her guts clenched. She slapped the iron ladder. Bananas fell to the floor. Her ears rang. There was a line of mold running from the top of the wall to the bottom. “Lipa!” she cried. “Come back!” She stamped on the bananas. “Why are you always running away from me?” she yelled. She kicked off her dirty slippers, trod the pulp, and felt it ooze up into her stockings. Everywhere, the scent of bruised fruit.
When she reached her room, it was in complete darkness. Usually she left a small light burning, but even this had been affected by the timer. It seemed as if a dark mist hung overhead, obscuring the map of Europe on the ceiling and the narrow windows. After putting on her nightgown, she propped herself up on pillows and angrily ate the cake. Then she tried to find a comfortable way to lie down, but each direction she turned felt bad, and her back ached. She pushed a cushion between her legs and then pulled it out again. The water in the cistern gurgled. In the hallway, the skylight dripped. A pair of mosquitoes whined. Something in the Brooklyn Navy Yard thumped rhythmically. The apartment was empty and yet the floor creaked, there came a sound like nails being pulled from a board, and the wind made the pegs on the washing lines up on the roof chatter. Her bed was first icy cold and then much too hot, the pillow too firm and then utterly flat. It was only after she had turned the pillow over for the ninth or tenth time that she realized her belly was getting hard at regular intervals, that the ache in her back might be the beginning of an electric something that tingled and ran around to the front. She sat up and fished for her watch, but in the dark, she couldn’t see the hands. It was still yontiff. She couldn’t turn on the light.
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