by Sonia Taitz
His free hand wrestled with his spiffy black trousers. Lily realized that he wasn’t “protected,” told him so, and tried to stop him. She heard her mother’s voice, chiding, “think with your head, Lily; think with your head.” No mother, I can’t. I won’t. And he wouldn’t let her, and she loved him for that.
“But what if?” was the last thing she said.
Julian echoed the sound of her words: “What if what if what if . . . .”
He struck up a rhythm with the words, swept her up in it. God weaves crazy plans in mortals. Spirits fantasize in women’s wombs. Dreaming of what to be. What if a soul came to visit, made of their love. Souls come into our ignorance, having their say. Steadily. Traveling into the blind center. What if they never came home? At the time, it seemed anything but scary; it was home.
When at last her womb stirred, she pulled him inward, and he cried out.
An answering cry from downstairs: “Daddy!” Julian chuckled softly.
22
Europe, 1944
LILY’S FATHER had been married before. His first wife and his son were dead. A “righteous gentile” had hidden his family when the terror reached Poland. They had been given refuge beneath a barn. A storage area had been built there, and a few cracks in the wood floor were enlarged to provide them with air to breathe. Straw covered the hinged entry from view. Overhead were the sweet cows, whose mooing offered company, and whose brown bodies, precious heat.
Each night the old gentile, Pavel, brought food and water to the family and removed their waste. He never complained. These acts of mercy occurred in the silent darkness; only the moonlight on the straw illuminated Pavel’s white head, hoary as that of a tired god, bowed to his huddled charges.
The cold was cruel to them. They could not get up and walk about to warm themselves. Their blood congealed in their veins. Only the infant boy could exercise his limbs in the narrow tomb; he stretched and twisted. The boy was a living hearth, warming them wherever he lay. He was a happy baby, ignorant of the world, for his mother’s milk was magically right, and her arms protected him.
Then the mother became ill. She developed a high fever that shook her bones up, but for all the rattling she was never warm. Even the baby boy draped on her body could not keep her warm. The fever persisted for a few days, and then lifted as suddenly as it had descended. The reprieve was short, however. With the next blizzard, the sickness returned. This time it overcame her, and her soul flew away.
When Pavel came that evening, he saw a strange sight, under the glow of the moon through the open barn door. A baby at a man’s breast, tugging at the nipple and screaming with anger. The man’s eyes were tightly shut, and he cradled the small bald head in one hand. He did not pull the child’s mouth away from his breast. He let it make its demand. Pavel heard Josef speak:
“Try,” said Josef, with a strange, sad smile. “Maybe milk will come.”
Then Pavel saw that the Jewess had died. He pulled the dead woman out of the shelter and carried her outdoors. Josef could not follow. The last view of his wife: a pair of feet, silver in the moonlight. The mute soles of her feet. The dead mother of a screaming child.
Pavel cracked the earth outside the barn. He stood quietly, staring at her. She wore a thin shift, through which her breasts could easily be seen. She looked exceptionally young. Her breasts were still full, the nipples stiff. She smelled of milk, sweet and promising. He threw her into the ground, then threw the upchurned earth in after her, and crossed himself.
Pavel was frightened that someone would see him burying a woman. But what else could he have done? The body would soon have begun to stink in the hideaway. The cows would smell it after a short while, not to mention the two milkmaids who came each morning. Stupid they were, but God had given them each a nose.
The baby boy did not stop crying. Josef thought: now even an infant can know of horrors. Before, the world of men was crazy, but nature was not. My child had a mother. But now, nature has gone crazy too. A baby needs milk, and I am dry as dust. I am only a man: dust.
Pavel returned.
Josef said, “Is there any milk to give my son?”
But Pavel was an old man. His children were grown. Pavel thought, if I take the child to a wet nurse, there will be questions. Where did he come from, they will ask. The heavens above? And who is the father? Pavel, a limping old man? Who, then? God the Father himself? They will laugh. And why is this lad circumcised, they will ask. Is the little one perchance a Jew, a Zhid? That I could never admit, thought Pavel, never. They would kill us both, by the Holy Mother! He went into the house, and after a minute or so, returned.
“Here,” he said to Josef, kindly. He flourished an earthenware bowl.
“This is cow’s milk, but it is all I have. Take this cloth and dip it in, then put it in the boy’s mouth, and he will suck.”
Josef soaked the cloth in the milk and brought the tip of it to his son’s mouth; the baby fed.
“Does it taste good, little baby?” Pavel coaxed, so caught up with the world under his ground that he might himself have crawled in to join the father and child. The baby sucked and sucked, and his father kept dipping the cloth into the cow’s milk.
“These are good cows,” said Pavel. “I raised them from when they were born, and sucked the milk of their mothers,” he prattled encouragingly.
It would have been a wondrous sight to the soul of the mother, if souls look on: the kind old farmer, kneeling by the open trapdoor, murmuring to her husband and her boy, and the cows asleep beside them, and her own body, asleep outside, and the baby trying to live another day.
He failed. Did the mother see this, too? Did she hold out her arms and give him her breast to sleep upon again? Pavel opened the fresh grave and laid the baby down upon his mother. A tangle of bones.
Had Josef not been a learned man, he would not have been so furious with God. He remembered the story of Abraham and Isaac only too well; he had taken it too much to heart. God had told Abraham to take his son, his only son, his Isaac, and sacrifice him. And Abraham had been prepared to obey. But Isaac had been spared! God didn’t need the sacrifice; God didn’t want the sacrifice. He wanted only to know the extent of a man’s devotion. Abraham offered and God refused. Isaac, his Isaac, had lived!
The story made sense to a man: God was only testing Abraham. So when the little boy had asked his father where the sacrificial lamb was, Abraham had said, “God will provide,” and God made the words true. He had provided a real animal, and not a little boy, the light of his father’s old eyes. But what was a man to believe when no ram was found? When the sacrifice was the precious son himself? What then?
“My only son!” roared Josef, shaking his head from side to side like a wounded animal.
After a while, when his anger had tired him (he was only human, and could not bear a grudge against God forever), he tried with all his might to remember his sin. He kept trying to remember what he had done. He kept failing.
23
Europe, 1976
AT ABOUT 11:15, Julian got up slowly and began dressing. “I’d better get back to the Ball before midnight.”
They both thought this sounded like Cinderella’s itinerary (jumbled) and laughed. Lily got up, too, straightened her clothes, and smoothed the bed. She felt its heat in her hand. She walked over to open the bedroom door, but before she could take a step, Julian had her back on the bed, and they rolled around, kissing and struggling.
“Your clothes!” she sputtered, half twisting away. “You’ll ruin them!”
“Oh. Yeah,” he said, acting very sober, and they both laughed at this.
He stood at the mirror, straightening his shirt, and reached for the elegant bowtie. He looked straight into his own blue eyes and said, “Lily, come look. I look different, don’t I?”
“You do,” she said.
Her face was as wild as his. They felt married.
“Do my tie for me.”
As her hands rose up to his throat she
couldn’t resist: she wrapped the tie around his neck and pulled him down to her open mouth. She could have drunk those kisses from the old year and into the new.
The door groaned on its hinges. They parted, whipping their heads around, half-expecting to see Timothy wielding a birch rod.
“Oops!” said Julian, sniggering into his hand.
But no one was there. A chilly wind swept in. Faintly, the voice of the radio announcer: 11:30. Lily saw Whisk in the hallway, twitching his tail.
“Timothy?” Julian called out.
She looked at him.
“We probably should have put him to bed when you came home.”
“He’ll keep,” said Julian. “He’s been to bed late before.” He looked just a tiny bit uneasy. “It’s New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?”
“Let’s go and see how he’s doing.”
Julian stood stock still for a moment. Then he descended the stairs.
“Timmy? Timmy?” Julian called out.
Lily stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, then flew down to join him.
Just beyond the sitting room where Timothy had sat, the door was swinging open, letting the world in. It was a lewd, uncanny sight. The wind blustered it to and fro; it moaned out protestingly on its hinges.
Lily took Julian’s hand to encourage him; his stayed stiff and separate. He didn’t seem to know that she was there.
“Oh, God, Oh, God,” he wailed, “what’s going on. Do you think he’s been kidnapped?”
He ran outside, Lily following him.
There was hardly any light outside; only bluish patches of snow, and strips of ice flickering like lively water. A car passed on the dirt road, turning a corner. Julian ran out toward the headlights, but the car had passed. It was dark again. Lily wandered dully into the darkness, circling, not more than ten yards from the house. Her foot touched a warm clod. It was Timothy, face down to the ground. When she flipped him over, his eyes were closed, but he gave out a tiny groan.
“Julian!” she screamed. “I found him! Come!”
Julian ran over, and glanced downward at Timothy.
“He’s breathing, but there’s some blood, and he might be unconscious,” said Lily, her voice coming out in pants.
“I’ll go and get Mum and Archibald,” said Julian. “You call for help.”
She heard him run away, toward the New Year’s Ball. The blood on Timothy’s brow was thickening; his yellow hair was matted and stiff. She tried to lift him but fell on a big broken bough of a yew tree. He must have tripped right there, just on that very bough, running from her. Her feet slipped and slided in gullies of ice and snow. She sank down in the wet and pulled Timmy into her lap.
He was a heavy boy, and when she rose with him, they flopped down together. Finally, she made it into the house. She slammed the door against the cold. She heard her own voice saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
Timothy lay on the sofa. There was an unflappable look on his face, a look of pure disdain.
Lily grabbed the telephone and dialed the operator. When he answered, she could not speak.
“Can’t hear you, hello?”
“He fell!” she sobbed. “We fell in the snow!”
“What’s that, Miss?”
“We fell in the snow!!” she screamed into the receiver, as loudly as she could.
Timothy opened his eyes, and Lily dropped the phone, meeting his stare head on. She could take it. His lips were pinkish blue, but his eyes burned into her. She leaned her head down towards his.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said. She stroked his hair with her shaking hands; she cupped his cold cheeks.
“Can I hold you?”
He let her pick him up and put him to her chest. He leaned his head on her shoulder.
“Oh, my poor baby,” she said, “I’m so sorry. Mummy and Daddy should be home, soon. Any minute. What happened?”
Timmy lifted his head and started to speak “I—I run—” and then, as though remembering, cried piteously and sank his head back down on Lily’s shoulder.
Lily cried too. Together, they shook with sadness and relief, as though they were of one flesh and one blood.
24
JULIAN DASHED INTO THE BALLROOM panting, wild-eyed. It was nearly midnight; all the faces were silly and merry. He couldn’t find Archibald or his mother for a few agonizing minutes. Then he spotted them. There they were. Dancing the tango. Archibald seemed especially bouncy and free. His haunches jiggled as he led his wife across the dance floor. Helena looked beautiful and young. She held her head up high when she saw her son. She whispered into Archibald’s ear, and they danced toward Julian.
“Darling!” she sang out, waving her arm. “Where have you been?” She threw her head back and put a long hand to her moist throat. “Gosh, isn’t it hot?”
Julian’s mind played a trick on him just then. He thought not of Timothy, but of Lily, beneath him, alive. He went hot and cold; he went electric.
“Mother.”
“Yes, dear?”
“Whatever is wrong with you?” said Archibald, beginning to notice.
“Mother tonight I—Lily was—Timothy is—”
In a moment he would confess what he’d been doing on her bed.
“What is it? What are you saying? Speak up, lad!” said Archibald, loudly.
“What is it, dear? What did you say about Timothy?”
“He’s, he’s . . .”
“Has something happened? Is Timothy all right?”
“No, Mother we’ve got to help him, we’ve got to leave!”
“But what in heaven’s name has happened, dear? Where on earth have you been?”
Suddenly she saw it all.
“You’ve been home, have you?” Bitter eyes, bitter mouth.
It was an accident, thought Julian. The baby’s escape and fall, the blood in the snow. The world was no greater than this: Lily, open and shuddering, soaked with his seed; Timothy, sinking into the cold silent earth. The tossing of bodies, this way and that. Accidents. A monumental groan escaped his lips.
“Let’s go, immediately,” said Archibald. He looked badly frightened.
“So you went home to see her,” said Helena. “And now, see what’s happened!”
She went to fetch Peter. He was chatting up a lovely brunette with porcelain skin and enormous round eyes. When his mother told him they had to leave, he looked terribly irritated. It was just before midnight.
Helena told him that Timothy had been hurt. The brunette’s mouth opened wide with surprise.
The merrymakers looked up, puzzled, as the Kendalls fled from the Ball. But then midnight struck and they lost themselves in revelry. Cheering, hugging, hailing the new.
25
LILY HEARD THE CAR pull into the driveway.
Archibald started shouting at her:
“Where’s my SON?”
Then he saw.
“What the devil have you done?”
Lily was still holding Timothy. Now sleeping peacefully, he looked like an angel. The blood on his brow looked like sweet chocolate. Helena tried to grab him away, but Lily wouldn’t let go. She slapped the girl’s face hard, twice, but she would not give the baby up. Her grip tightened. Peter gave Lily a powerful shove and she fell off the sofa, tumbling to the floor with Timothy, who burst out in panicked shrieks.
“Damn her!” cried Peter. “God! Damn her! Mother, he’s been hurt!”
“Oh, God,” sobbed Helena.
They were all huddled over the baby, shaking him, coaxing him, begging him to stop crying. Their hysteria made him cry all the harder.
“CALL THE DOCTOR!” Archibald bellowed. “The boy is injured. Call him now!”
Lily went over to where Julian stood, alone in a corner.
“I did call the doctor,” she told him softly.
“He looks better, Mum, he really does,” Julian offered. “Much better than when I saw him last—”
“Saw him last? What does that mean? You
were supposed to be at the ball, and she—”
“What do you mean he looks better? What happened?”
“He fell outside, Archibald. That’s all—”
“Outside? On a winter’s night? And what about this blood, then?”
“Did she strike him?”
“No, no,” said Lily. “He fell over a stump. He might have passed out, but only for a second.”
“Oh, God, I feel sick,” said Julian. “I’m going to be sick in a moment.”
He bent over his stomach, holding it with both hands.
Then Lily noticed an old grey man in the room, bending over Timothy. Beside him was a black bag. Doctor. He had just suddenly appeared. He hovered over the yellow flannel bundle like a vulture over a duckling. “Hit his head; heads bleed quite badly, but there’s no need to panic,” he said, swabbing at the blood with a quilted pad. “Here’s another bruise, at the ankle,” he continued thoughtfully.
“But his pajamas are soaked,” sobbed Helena.
“He fell in the snow,” said Lily. “He fell down and lay there.”
“Good job he didn’t freeze to death,” snapped Peter.
He stared at Lily and Julian.
“Don’t look at him,” he said to Lily. “Look at me. You were the one in charge. You can’t hide behind Julian now.”
“I’m not trying to,” she whispered.
“Speak up. Why weren’t you minding him? You were here to mind the baby. What on earth is the matter with you?”
They all stared at her. Even the doctor.
Archibald suddenly began screaming: “But this is truly unthinkable!! Do you think there’ll be any lasting damage?”
“Shouldn’t think so,” said the doctor. “Little boys are very sturdy, and they fall from trikes and trees. But they get up again, don’t they? We’ll keep an eye on him, of course.”
“I suppose your type of people would be suing someone by now,” muttered Helena.
“God, leave her people out of it,” said Julian, nearly inaudible. Only Lily could hear him.