“So what good did it do me? To have a door opened and then sealed shut in my face again? What good? I’m lying here like—like a whore giving birth under the bridge in the Tsar’s old Kiev, instead of … instead of the way I imagined it: a pink room filled with flowers, my own handsome doctor husband bending over me, everything spotless and modern and …” The tears started again. “Not this—this cell, this stink of Lysol and my own sweat that turns the sheets grey. All I can taste is salt, from crying … When all the trouble started, you say? If Momma wanted me to suffer, she sure is having her revenge.”
“Momma only wanted the best for you. That you catch a good man and give her the first real American grandchildren.”
“Well, I did and I am, but not like she expected,” Hokhmah muttered.
“You know I don’t mean like that!” Yetta snapped. “But at least you’ll be a mother, the greatest thing that can happen to a woman. Not like poor Esther, a widow already with only stillborn twins to show for it. Not like—not like me, who couldn’t even get pregnant.”
“I bet that’s not your fault,” her sister said, looking at the broad-hipped thick body in the chair. “I bet it’s that good-fornothing husband of yours, that weakling from the Old Country only fit for working in the hardware store with Poppa. I bet—”
“Shut your mouth, Hokhmah. I heard enough about that already from Momma. I didn’t want him in the first place. But the oldest daughter,” she sneered, “doesn’t get asked her opinion, you know. She marries who she’s told to marry in the Old Country. You were Momma’s big hope. You were going to be the one who would bring the whole family up, maybe marry a man rich enough to move us all to a big city where Poppa might find a temple congregation, be a real rabbi again. So Momma could be the rabbi’s wife again, like back in the village.”
Hokhmah unconsciously twisted and retwisted the damp bedsheet. “I did everything Momma said to. I quit college to help Poppa in the store. I helped her in the house. I helped Essie and you. I watched Avraham get sent all the way through college, and him only half so smart as me.”
“Hokhmah, you crazy or what?” Yetta chided. “Avraham would need to support a family in time. You know that.”
“And when Poppa died I took care of her. Other women my age had children already. That’s how she’d taunt me. Never a word of thanks I stayed with her instead. All those years, singing only to myself in my room but quiet, quiet, so she wouldn’t hear and have her heart wounded by my voice …”
Yetta sighed and wiped her glasses on her skirt hem. “So? Who knows? You think anybody else gets to do what they want? Life takes and does on you how it likes.”
But her sister rambled on, caught up in an eerie energy of bitterness. “I saved up my pennies scrimped from household money, and I bought the music and learned them in secret—all the arias I might have sung. All of them still there, fragments of melody inside my head, snatches never coming together whole—”
“Ach, you don’t even know what you’re saying anymore, Hokheleh, you’re so tired—”
“Never one full coming-together American meal at home. Always the day-old bread, the cheapest cuts, always either dairy or meat, always the kosher kitchen even after Momma got sick and I had to keep it, her sharp eyes spying out when I tried to sneak and not wash everything separately—dishes, silverware, pots, pans.”
Yetta stared at her in amazement. “Now there’s something wrong with keeping kosher? God’s own Law isn’t good enough for you? Like Broitbaum wasn’t a good enough name for you? You always gotta be different?”
Hokhmah shut her eyes. “Oh, you don’t know,” she said listlessly, “you don’t even know what an aria is. What’s the use of trying to make you understand?”
“It’s him put that into your head,” Yetta grumbled. “Like Momma said, he might as well have come from goyim, your precious David. Not a religious man, not—”
“He’s not Orthodox. He’s an educated man, Yetta. And he did always fast on Yom Kippur.”
“I should give him a medal?”
“I bet him and Poppa would’ve liked each other, though. Educated men, I mean—”
“Poppa knew the Talmud like a genius. Your fancy David ain’t good enough to clean Poppa’s boots.”
Hokhmah buried her face in the pillow. Not to have to hear it anymore. Was that one of the reasons she had loved David? Because he taught her that she could eat ham and lobster and laugh about it and not be struck dead by Jehovah? Because he recognized what she was singing when she sang? She heard her sister rise and move about the small room, arguing with herself.
“Empty he was, your David, behind the eyes. I saw that. I saw it when I went with you to meet him and the other refugees at the dock. Momma knew. ‘We don’t got troubles enough of our own?’ she said to me. ‘Now Hokhmah has to play big-shot Miss Millionaire? She has to volunteer to sponsor some high-class snob who just discovered pogroms exist? Some pretend goy who wouldn’t lower himself to speak to the likes of us in the old days?’ Nu? Momma was wrong? Time proves.” Hokhmah could hear her busily rearranging the few items on the bedtable. “Momma saw the emptiness, when she met him.”
“I saw it, too, Yetta,” came the muffled reply, “but I knew it was there from—from loss. Not from what Momma said—‘a soul full of scorn.’ Momma kept hissing any man who could slice cold steel through warm flesh somehow wasn’t right.” Hokhmah lifted her face from the pillow. “So much for his being a surgeon, the divine doctor I thought would please her. The tall, light-brown-haired—almost blond even—professional man. The German Jew, the pick of the crop, not Polish-Russian border like us, pogrom-peasants. From Vienna yet, speaking four languages, and with the devil’s cleft of a dimple in his chin.”
Yetta paused in her ministrations and nervously tucked a strand of her hair back into its bun. “I never knew what to say around him,” she shrugged, a gesture at indifference.
“You had plenty to say behind his back. I was reaching above my station, wasn’t that it? Essie kept saying what would he want me for? You all thought he only wanted me for to be sponsored for citizenship. But I’d already done that, through the Jewish Refugee Committee. I knew he wanted me for—for something about me.”
Made uneasy by the longing in her sister’s voice, Yetta retreated to her chair and lowered herself into it with a short groan. “So maybe,” she offered awkwardly, “we was all just jealous.” But Hokhmah, oblivious of both the offering and its cost, was helplessly tracing memories of her own loss.
“Merciful God, how I loved him! Everything about him—his immaculate hands with their clipped fingernails, the way he could order in French at a restaurant, how he took me to chamber-music concerts—even though he said the performances were ‘lamentably inferior’ to those in Vienna. His English was so elegant, wasn’t it, Yetta? So much better than mine, and I’d grown up speaking it, even. You know my heart would just stop, for pride, when I was with him? Because he said I was pretty. And with him I was. My skin, my eyes, I could feel them glow. With him I always held my head high, because he said I had the throat of a woman in a Klimt painting he’d show me someday. In some museum in Vienna, that I never got to see.” Yetta sat listening, an expression of spellbound wonderment on her face, like a child hearing a fairy-tale. “I loved him, don’t you see? I loved the way he moved—crisp, never a gesture wasted. I loved even his suffering. The only one left of his whole family. Thirty-seven relatives swallowed up by the concentration camps and belched out in oven-smoke. His whole world gone. The Bechstein piano he’d learned to play Beethoven sonatas on, the fancy Biedermeier glass, the Augarten china. Skiing in Switzerland on school holidays, the Salzburg Festival every summer. Not for him the Judengasse section of Vienna. Did you know that one of his third cousins had married a Rothschilde? One of his greatuncles even converted …” She turned to her sister, who sat staring at her with an awestruck glimmer of comprehension. “Oh, what’s the use?” she added in despair, “You can’t possibly understand.”<
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Stung, Yetta threw back, “I understand. I understand he used you. He needed to be supported in comfort while he studied to take the American medical examinations. You gotta face it, Hokhmah, face it!”
“You understand noth—” Hokhmah’s fierce gaze went blank, her sight wrenched inward as if listening for where the stabbing would puncture next. “Here it comes oh God God God here it comes again …”
This time the pain hit as a great wave, jagged edges of agony bobbing in its sweep like shards of glass that only a thousand years of tidal ebb and flow might smooth. She went under, surfaced, gasped for air, was pulled under again. She was distantly aware of her sister moving, shouting to her, trying to hold on to her against the convulsive pull and roar. Had she once been alive? Was that it? Was that what he’d loved her for? That she’d brought him life after all that death? “You have the pulse of life in you, my dear,” he’d said. She dove and swam in the hurt, a whole wide deep-sea underwater landscape of pain where she cried aloud in voiceless bubbles of oxygen I loved him. For having survived. For having realized what was happening to his beautiful rotting Europe. For having escaped and faked papers and crawled through sewers and worked with those surgeon’s hands as a manual laborer. For moving on again and sleeping in railway stations and conning police and border officials with his perfect accents in French and Italian. For finally connecting to the Dutch underground and making it to England and to freedom … She floated free now, free and at home in the anguish. She was somebody else. Est-ce toi, Marguérite, Est-ce toi?
Somebody was calling to her. She called back to him. I was so sure I could do it, David. Triumph over the death camps, the goose-stepping armies, the neighbors who looted your family home. My singing could drown out every sound you’d been forced to hear between the last notes of a Beethoven sonata struck on your Bechstein until the evening your face showed such surprise that I could sing “Vissi d’Arte.” My body, “the Rubens nude with the Klimt throat” you call it, this body that’s not marked by tattoed blue numbers, this body can wipe out the silhouettes of walking human skeletons. These eyes, “dark as the Donau flowing through the Wienerwald,” you say, my eyes can drown whole firmaments of yellow stars. Il m’aime, il ne m’aime pas …
Dimly, she felt a hand on her forehead and opened her eyes. But it was Yetta, not him. It was a dry flat world, alien as the cavernous deeps of pain once had been.
“I didn’t know about her,” she mumbled plaintively to her sister, “I didn’t even know there was a ‘her.’” She couldn’t stop babbling through these lips so cracked they must belong to somebody else, not the lips he’d kissed. But she had to make Yetta understand. “Somebody meant for him, pledged to him by family ties. Somebody of his own class and education who’d already got out of Vienna and was waiting in London for him to settle here and then bring her as his bride. I didn’t know,” she repeated. “It never occurred to me …”
Yetta tried to cover her concern with a familiar harangue of harsh love. “Ach, little one, always you were arrogant. Always wearing blinders to what you didn’t want to see.”
She felt her eyes fill again. Was this all they could ever do, accuse?
“I thought—I thought the letters with King George’s face on the stamps were from friends who’d helped him in England. I thought he wanted to marry me, that we’d spend our whole lives together and die in each other’s arms. I thought someday Momma’d have to admit I’d been right to defy her. I thought he just needed—time. To feel alive again.”
“You thought!” Yetta snorted. “Who are you to think? Face it, I tell you. You were a meal-ticket.” Exasperated at her younger sister, she tried to change the subject. “You want some water? You want to smell the nice flowers I got you? See? Whachamacallits.”
“Chrysanthemums.” Hokhmah turned her head away again, and heard Yetta withdraw to the chair. The click of knitting needles maybe meant that her sister would leave her in peace. How could you ever make anybody like Yetta understand? But then, she herself couldn’t understand. Her mind kept circling round and round what even now she couldn’t believe. He’d never said. He’d never said a word. Not until she’d told him she was pregnant. Colla mia! O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! Maybe she’d still have chosen to give and do for him and feel alive in doing it. That crooked, sad smile of his that ripped her heart with pity. Like she used to rip open a garment, seam by seam, to redo it. Working as a seamstress in the custom dress shop to support him. Oh yes, for him she’d dared to leave Momma, and quickly, break with everything, start in a new place, a real city, find a tiny apartment. Work in the shop all day, get groceries, cook, clean. Endure Momma’s phone calls of hatred. Quiz him for his oral exams half the night and make love with him the other half. Hold him tight and sing to him when the Nazi nightmares came haunting. Then get up and do it all over again the next day. Maybe she could have fought for him, if only she’d known what she was up against. His parents’ plans for him. His loyalty to them still rising in him like a plume of smoke from the crematoria. His clinging to the one person left who shared those childhood memories of the Bechstein and the Danube, the woman he’d already become engaged to at a banquet in the Hotel Sacher right in the teeth of war rumors. If only …
As if she’d been eavesdropping on her sister’s thoughts, Yetta interrupted them. “Stop thinking about him, Hokhmah. Mooning over him won’t change facts. You’re no baby. You’re a twenty-nine-year-old woman and you’re gonna have a child. We gotta think what to do. You better make up your mind, you come live with me and Jake or you go to Essie. Maybe in time you find a decent man to marry you and be a father to your baby. Maybe one of Jake’s friends. That Shlomo, he always fancied you. In the meantime, soon as the baby’s big enough, you get a job, maybe at the dress factory …”
Yetta’s voice droned on, bleakly outlining an intolerable future that roused every cell of her sister’s brain and body to resistance. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could still fight that sick old world of his, those ghosts. With her peasant energy, her Klimt throat and Rubens body, her arias. She didn’t have to wind up like Yetta and Essie …
Hokhmah cut through her sister’s plans in a furious voice. “No. You’ll never never understand. I’m not like you! I can’t live like you do!”
Yetta’s face grew ugly with an old envy and a still older fear. “You and your fancy education, Hokhmah! How dare you look down on your own family? I’m not the one lying there pregnant by some scum who abandoned me!” She lumbered up out of the chair again and stalked over to the bed. “Grateful you should be, down on your knees with thanks to Essie and me for standing by you! You got nobody else, you hear me? Nobody else in the whole world!”
“I’ve got me! And I’ve got my baby! What makes you think when his son is born he won’t change his mind and realize he wanted to marry me all along?”
“Dreamer! Crazy stupid fool! Blinders again you’re wearing! You’re nothing to him! You were an affair, a stopping-off place! You were his whore!”
Hokhmah struggled to sit up in bed, rage and will lifting her above the wrench of bone and muscle.
“That’s what you say, Yetta. But I know better. You can’t have any kids. But I’m going to have a son. You’ve never known what it’s like to feel—real passion. Well, I have. I always wanted to feel what none of you’d ever felt, and I have—a sweet wild loving you’d never talk about, a—a joy in the body you always whispered didn’t happen for a woman, something beyond what Momma always said was bearing it and the reward being children and then—what? Getting fatter, getting older, fighting with each other in Yiddish, dying?”
Yetta struck her hard, in the face. She could feel her cracked lip begin to bleed, but she wore it in triumph, like a heroic wound. Yetta was screaming at her, the way Momma had, the only way they knew how to live. She reached out and grabbed the chrysanthemums from their vase and threw them in Yetta’s face.
“Get out!” she yelled. “You’re coarse and vulgar and ignorant! You�
�ll never in a million years know who I am! I don’t need any of you! Get out!”
To her amazement, Yetta obeyed. She watched her older sister, livid with insult, gather up her belongings and huff to the door.
“Momma was right to curse you, Hokhmah! You’re a crazy woman, a—a snake, an ungrateful—”
“And stay out! Forever!”
She went. She actually went.
Alone in the room, Hokhmah felt an exhilaration of freedom thrill through her. Then the fear struck, harder than Yetta’s hand against her face. And with it came the next sweep of pain, drawing her down into herself, into a dark world lit only by flares rupturing along every nerve, a world where now only her own consciousness, her own voice, could keep her from going mad.
Oh … It’s fading again, thank God.
Oh no … oh somebody help, I peed all over myself in that last one, didn’t even know it, couldn’t even feel it.
God this is so humiliating!
Where in hell is that—
“Nurse!”
Why me? Perché me rimunari cosi? Why did this have to happen to me? Just because I wanted something different from them? Things they never even knew about me … In Mexico, that time … for Momma and all of them I left him. Strange beautiful man. Wanted to make love to me. Sent me flowers. They never even knew what I could have done, didn’t, for their sake. And for Your sake, damn You, God. Te amo, he kept whispering to me, sitting there in that sidewalk café with those little mosaic tables and the candlewax dripping down the bottle. I didn’t know what to say back to him. I could feel myself getting wet and I thought how funny I must’ve got my period early or something so I got up and went to the ladies’ room but there wasn’t anything except me being wet. What in hell did I know? I was seventeen. I wanted him to love me and I didn’t want to lose him or make him mad at me. So romantic he was. It was like fire, like a brand, where he touched my elbow, steering me through the crowds. His handprint on my elbow, under my short sleeve … But I didn’t. I remembered how I’d hurt her about the singing and so I didn’t. He never even got mad at me, just such a pitiful smile when I told him I couldn’t. I cried. He kissed my hand, gently. His lips were like moths. That’s when he gave it to me, the turquoise bracelet. He took it out of his pocket, wrapped in bright red tissue paper. Wrists like a Mayan princess, that’s what he said. These wrists, swollen like my ankles have been for months. These wrists.
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