by Sonia Taitz
“Peter,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened that night. It was an awful, awful night. I’m sorry Timmy had to suffer because of my carelessness. If I could erase it all, I would. I wish it had been me that had fallen in the snow. I can’t tell you how ashamed I feel when I think of how the baby suffered out there ‘til we found him.”
He turned away, pulled open a desk-drawer and fished out his cigarette case. He took out a cigarette; his hand shook as he lit it. “Well, look. Mum thinks you’re a slag. Arch thinks you’re the Antichrist. I don’t think Timothy includes you in his little prayers at night. But I will always care for you. Strangely enough. Julian told me how it all happened. Look, it’s all right.”
She had suddenly started crying. He put his arms around her.
“Do you know what?” she said. “I haven’t had a period in two months.”
“You’re pregnant?”
She nodded. Sabina gave a shriek that opened one of Julian’s unconscious eyes for an instant, as though the eye itself had shrieked. Like a train whistle in the blind night. Peter did not immediately react.
“Are you sure?” he said lamely.
She nodded her head.
“I mean do you—are you actually going to have it?”
“Don’t you think I ought to? I mean it’s going to be some baby. Julian and I have pretty interesting sets of genes.” She looked at Julian; so did Peter.
“Does he happen to know about your grand plans?”
“No, I’m not telling him until I’m ready.”
“When . . .er . . . do you think that’ll be, Lily?”
“After, after Passover. After Easter vac,” she amended. “I’ll see my parents, and think it over, and and maybe I’ll write to him.
“I need to see them, you know,” she persisted, though he didn’t contradict her. “They love me more than he ever could, and only they can help me.”
But even as she said these words she knew they couldn’t help her out of this. They had risen to the Holocaust, but it had made them shy of hard, sudden twists of fortune. They would be stricken by the news; they would treat it like one more sighing burden. Mobilizing an old sadness, Josef would move tentatively; Gretta, warily. They would be her children as much as she their child. But there was the healthy, new life inside her to protect, too.
She nervously smoothed her round little stomach. It connected in her mind with the Passover feast, with the Matzoh-wafers. Every year, Josef explained that it was the poor bread that had sustained the Jews thousands of years ago, as they wandered through the wilderness. But one year, Gretta had said, “And the pious Germans wouldn’t give a Jew a piece of Matzoh this big in the camps on Passover!” She had made a small tight circle in the air with angry fingers. Lily thought guiltily of the Communion wafer she had swallowed; that was the size of it. Small and round. But couldn’t hope be small and round?
“Lily, what’s wrong, you look dreadful.”
Peter’s voice was gentle as her father’s now.
“Look here. You don’t sound very sensible at all to me. Are you sure you’ve thought about this?”
“Oh, I’ve thought and thought,” she said, vaguely trying to picture getting on the plane. She couldn’t imagine flying with this awesome weight in her.
“Really,” she said, “this is the very best thing. I feel too weak here, things don’t go the way I plan, and . . .” Her voice broke off inconclusively.
“Peter, what choice do I have?”
“Look, Sabina,” said Peter, “will you leave us alone for a minute? Take a walk in the quad or something. Thanks. There’s a girl.”
Sabina left slowly, and with a poor grace.
“Lily,” he said, “I am very, very fond of you. You are the dearest thing, with your serious face and silly ideas. And Julian loves you.”
He saw a tremor in her face.
“You take my word for it. My word of honor. He loves you. Even when he doesn’t seem to.
“But we’ve all been shaken, and miserable, and things have gone a bit funny between us. I don’t even know what’s caused it. I know I shouted some very cruel things at you that night. I was a bit over the top, as Miss Fanning likes to say. I was a bit hysterical about Timmy. It’s funny, maybe I love the little half-breed after all.
“It must be blood, Lily. His mother is my mother, and Julian’s mother. Our mother’s son. I couldn’t stand to see him lying there like that. As though he were dead. I thought he was. It honestly frightened me. We’re all brothers, and I felt it that night very strongly. But Lily, I don’t blame you any more than I blame Julian. It was an accident. And if it was more—if it was a crime of passion—then I actually envy you for that passion. It’s a rare thing. I’ve never felt it.
“Do you understand, though, why we’ve been so standoffish? It’s a matter of blood. A silly concept, I know. But it’s passed. Timothy’s all right. It’s passed.”
She said nothing. She was thinking: no, it hasn’t passed. The baby we’re talking about, I’m carrying him. Your blood and mine are mingled; I walk around with it, and it grows strong. He’s mine. And Julian’s. And Timothy’s. And your mother’s. And still mine. And this life will be a Jewish life, because this time, I’m behind the “silly concept.” I’m the one who’s closing ranks.
Once, staring at the lamb-shank on the Passover plate, she’d asked: “Why do they call Christ the Paschal lamb?”
“Well, Lily,” her father had answered, “You know that Jesus was Jewish. Fine. He had a Passover Seder, in Israel, where we come from. This was just before he died. So there was before him Matzoh, and bitter herbs, and also the Paschal lamb. Now why they call him a lamb is another story. Because to them his death created another Torah, you know, Lily. The New Testament.
“So they took the ‘Old’ Testament, our Torah that was handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai, and they decided that it was useless, like an old father you don’t need anymore. And they stuck it in the corner, disgraced and forgotten. But Lily, the old person was not dead. The old person was endowed with eternal life. Because the Jews did not forget him.”
“For our loyalty we have been tortured for thousands of years,” Gretta had said. “In the name of that gentle lamb.”
Looking now at Peter’s lashless, puzzled eyes, Lily felt murderous. She was glad that Julian couldn’t hear them talking about “Us” and “Them.” She hated that xenophobic, bloody-minded feeling; she hated herself for sharing it. Personal love can be broken on such inquisitions. And broken, disgraced, like the “old person” her father had spoken of, how could it be remembered forever?
But then she looked over at the beautiful Julian. She had never seen a more miraculous creature of nature. He had thought her lovable. He had loved her in the best way that he knew, to the limit that he could. His body, too, had fit hers perfectly. They had made real love, in wild belief. His seed had taken on life inside her. She had made a home for him there. Why didn’t this change anything?
A lovely, dreaming boy she had to leave. For good. She bent over and imprinted a kiss on his brow.
Peter came over to her. He held her quaking body in his arms. She steadied herself.
“Good-bye, Lily.”
He waved at the door. She heard him shut it behind her. Then there was silence, and a hollowness, and a burning as she quickly walked the stairs.
31
Europe, 1977 / Europe, 1944
WALKING BACK TO HER ROOM on the cobblestoned path, in the dark of the night, the young girl called up Peter’s voice in her head: Goodbye, Lily. Goodbye, Lily. Good-bye, Goodbye.
Her own name lilted strangely in her ears that night, as she walked through the winding streets.
Lilililililily.
A funny name. Tonight she hardly knew it. Perhaps it had never, really, been hers. Like many other Jewish children, Lily Taub had been named after a dead person, and not only a dead person, but a martyr.
Was it some dead soul, replacing Peter’s voice in Lily’
s ear?
Lily’s mother had been lucky in concentration camp. An opening (death) had occurred among the kitchen workers and she had been selected to fill it. What a sign from above! This meant that she would no longer be exposed to the cold, that the work itself would be far less exhausting, and that most of all she would be sure of having enough to eat! As soon as the news got around that Gretta was going to work with food, people treated her with special respect. She was now powerful.
The soup they gave her to ladle out was thin. At the bottom of the bucket, though, were solid bits. A piece of potato could save a life; so could a couple of beans. The question was (the question was visible on the starving faces): would she ladle from the thick bottom or from the watery top? How could she stand to look at those faces behind their trembling, upraised bowls? Almost expiring, but for the quickening desperation when her ladle began to dip. How they glittered, those eyes; how they flattered and cursed her, those mouths.
Eventually, Gretta ladled mechanically, feeling only a growing fatigue in her arm as, cooperatively, the bucket began to empty. She poured and poured as supplicants passed, a weary priest among whispers and wails.
Gretta’s closest friend at the camp was called Lili. She had been a startling beauty when she first arrived, with a thick mane of hair and dazzling eyes. She stood, hands on hips, and stared at the Nazis very calmly. Her gaze remained calm as her hair was shaved away, exposing a great naked head. She held it aloft, as though it were an Egyptian bronze.
Lili was assigned to the bunk below Gretta’s. During the first night, she had spread her lips wide and sung full-throatedly in the dark barracks. Her voice was low and it was strong, too; the wooden bunks vibrated mesmerically. Those who slept through Lili’s songs were deep sleepers; perhaps something in the notes made them sleep the more deeply. The song was not familiar to Gretta, but she found it easy to understand, the way one understands a formless cloud, or the moon that does not always look, or have to look, like a smiling face. It was like birdsong; it advanced to no climax, and did not therefore fall away.
Not long after Lili was brought to the camp, she found favor in the eyes of a Nazi. In the daytime, she had dug trenches, her large legs planted apart like a trestle, flinging dirt over her shoulder so cockily that all the Nazis had taken notice of her. All the Nazi-men: they gawked at Lili, at her magnificent hips, working for them, at her beautiful head, ripe as a gourd, at her parted mouth, streaming with notes. She grinned insolently at them, never breaking rhythm with the hard dirt at her feet. One Nazi, among all, had returned a grin. Lili did not especially notice him; she did not focus. But eventually he made her focus.
Eventually, she lay on her back beneath him, silently. Still later, because he became a human being to her, and she, perhaps, to him, she found herself singing in his ear as her arms and legs danced upwards in the air above his head. Her hair grew back quickly, becoming downy to his soft caressing strokes. Her muscles softened; she never put a thread on them; she was ever on the bed, his ready infant. The man used to suck at her nipples, as though he had forgotten who was weak and who strong, who the parent and who the child.
She sang him to sleep, rocking her wide hips below. In time he threw Lili out. But not before every Nazi who cared to had degraded her as the stinking Jew-whore she was. Her man was in the next room, listening to the sounds of his fellows laughing in her face and raping her. He felt murderous; he had had enough of her; she was beginning to make a fool of him. Those Jew-witches get into your heart, he thought. He was getting soft as a woman; she’d bedeviled him.
Let her try her tricks on them, he thought, and let her wiggle those hips in the gas chamber. Choking Jews dance wild in there. Her songs and her smirks and her crocodile tears. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, he thought, pacing the floor, listening to her cries.
A gang of men in uniform approached Lili to do the quick business. They stood on the edge of the rumpled bed and lugged her roughly to them, one by one, by her ankles. Few undressed. They unzipped, retaining their status, then zipped again, restored.
All of them having had her, one or two invented a new amusement. They decided to crush her face. One smashed her nose, the other sent her teeth flying. Her mouth collapsed. Her blood soaked the floor.
“Call in another whore to mop up here!” yelled one chunky Nazi, gaily hoisting his trousers (this one had stripped to avoid staining the fresh uniform). The bed itself was drenched.
Lili did not die just then. She returned to work. This was about the time that Gretta began working in the kitchen. Lili was unrecognizable, and could not chew the extra scraps that Gretta managed to sneak to her. She listlessly pushed peelings back to her molars, and then would forget to chew. Gretta learned to treat her like a baby: she chewed the food herself, then placed it into Lili’s mouth, coaxing her with a soft voice, “Try, Lili, please.” One of Lili’s eyes could not open anymore, and the other oozed involuntary tears, and looked out with a horrifying docility.
“Lili! Please, for me!” begged Gretta. Where Lili had once stood planted by day, she now trembled pathetically in the wind, confused, looking down with wonder into the deep hole the others were busily digging. It was a mass grave.
Goodbye, Lili, goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye.
Lily was named after this woman, and not, as was the convention, after her grandparents, who also toppled somewhere in Europe, into anonymous earth. It was not that Gretta had forgotten her own mother and father. But when she first heard her daughter’s strong, stubborn cries, she thought of the singing voice of Lili in the dark barracks.
Lily, winding home, sang out again:
Lililililililily.
She did not summon up martyrdom to Holy Wars, or martyrdom to love. She heard the sound, pure: a magical, lilting, umbilical tune, anchored securely inside her.
It sang her homeward.
32
IN THE MIDDLE OF HER JOURNEY, Lily stopped with a jolt: a sudden instinct warned her away from danger. She knew, all at once, what her parents would tell her to do: abort.
The Lili after whom she was named had once been pregnant, too. That was a secret she had learned not from her mother, but from another survivor, Eva. Eva had winked and said, “Why do you think the Nazi threw her out? It was because she was carrying a child from him. Imagine: half Jew and half Nazi. Imagine. On the night he threw her to the dogs, she must have lost it. Or if not then, then later, when they put her to work, broken, in the fields again. No one wants a baby like that on this earth. Not Jew, not Christian.” When Lily had told her parents what she knew about her namesake, her mother had responded: “It was not God’s will to bind two enemies.” Even her gentle father had added, “You see, Lily, such a baby goes against nature.”
With all her heart, she longed to be back with Mrs. Dancer and little Rebekah. Mrs. Dancer would protect her from danger, surely. But Lily could not stay longer with the poor woman; the house was tiny, and crowded. Mrs. Dancer had her own daughter, who by now would be back from London.
There was no place for Lily to go.
33
JULIAN SAT UP IN BED, sad and tense. The bedding was twisted around his body like a chrysalis.
“She was here? In this room? Last night? Why on earth didn’t you tell me, Peter?”
Peter knelt over the electric kettle, and Julian couldn’t see his face. He was making coffee.
When he had finished stirring in the cream and sugar, he rose, strode over to Julian, and handed him a steaming mug.
Then he said: “Because you were a ruddy, two-ton, drooling cadaver last night, that’s why. How much did you pour down?”
“No, Peter. Why?”
Julian had no one else to plead to. There was no Lily in the room. The fact that he’d missed her by inches and hours filled him with an ungovernable sadness.
“Look, Julian, it isn’t all up to me, is it? It’s really your doing. You were at the theatre last night. You saw her. You ran out. And you got dead drunk. You.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” said Julian.
He gave a little wincing toss of the head.
“Well, then. Whose fault is it? Lily’s? Mine? And you ran out before my best scene. You missed my best scene. It amazes me that my own brother could walk out on the last performance of my first big part. My best scene. Ask anyone. I turned puce in that scene last night; I was brilliant! You disloyal pig.” He was only half-teasing.
“And now it’s all over, Julian. My play. You will never see it again. So don’t you yell at me for not doing something for you.”
He sighed out lengthily.
“All right. All right. You look shattered. You smell awful. You must feel awful. You’re not even drinking your coffee, and here I’ve used fresh cream and demerara sugar.”
“Peter, don’t, please. Don’t be funny now.”
Julian rolled over on his stomach and dug his face into the pillow.
“Lily was here last night,” he said, “and I slept right through it.”
“I suppose, then, that you don’t recall Lily’s kissing you?”
“Just stop, Peter! Won’t you?”
“I’m not being funny. It’s true, little brother.”
“Kissed me? What do you mean?” He turned around slowly.
“On your forehead. And you slept right through. Were you pretending?”
“No!”
“Frankly, she seemed to think so. I could tell. I pick these things up. I’m an experienced actor sensitive to the nuances, you know. She seemed a bit surprised that you didn’t open your eyes. Hurt, I’d say. But she covered it up. She was very coy. As though she’d be perfectly happy never to see you again. But we know Lily better than she thinks we do, don’t we?”
“I hope so.”
“So. If a kiss couldn’t wake you, or the manufactured shrug of your darling’s coy shoulders, what could I have hoped to do? Turned you upside-down and let the drink slide out?”