The Length of a String

by Elissa Brent Weissman

  I said I would like that, and I meaned it. Before I left, Mme. Veron took me in her arms and kissed both my cheeks. She said, “The transition can be hard. It is still hard, even for me. And the news from home . . .” She closed her eyes and shook her head . . . she understands. “If you need someone to talk to, when the words won’t come in English, you can always come to me.”

  Would you believe I started to cry? It was so sudden, I couldn’t stop myself. Mme. Veron gave me a hug again, and even though I knew her less than one hour, it did not seem strange to be crying into her shoulder. When I stopped finally and pulled away, I saw that she was crying too.

  “Hey,” said a familiar voice. I turned around, which was really awkward, since I was so close to the fence. It was Ethan. He was wearing jeans and a jacket, because he’s not an idiot.

  “Hey,” I said. I closed the diary and placed it in my backpack.

  “Practicing on an off day? You’re such a Williams.”

  I tried to think of something witty, but thinking clearly wasn’t my thing today. Better to tell the truth. “I thought it was a Thursday. I’m stupid, I know.”

  Ethan walked onto the court. He took off his backpack and sat down next to me. Well, pretty close. We both leaned against the fence. “Once,” he said, “I got up at six forty-five, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and walked halfway to school before I realized it was a Saturday.”

  I looked at him with my eyes wide, my mouth halfway open and halfway smiling. “No way.”

  “You’re right, no way. I just wanted to make you feel better.”

  I punched his arm lightly. “Hey!”

  “Oh!” Ethan said. “But I did stay up late last night to finish that essay for Mrs. Magill’s class.”

  I cocked my head. “Why? That’s not due till next week.”

  “Exactly.” His voice cracked on the ack part, but he didn’t even blush.

  I grinned. “So, your form of being an idiot is being an extra-good student.”

  “And yours is being an extra-good tennis player.”

  “Right. That, and I’m having an identity crisis.”

  Ethan didn’t have a response to that. To be fair, how could he? It must’ve sounded totally random and like way too much information. I was suddenly glad to have my tennis racquet in my lap. Fiddling with the strings gave my fingers something to do and my eyes someplace to look. I had to explain, but I didn’t want to talk about the Skype call and my mom’s record-setting bath. So I told him about the other thing consuming my mind, starting with, “My great-grandma died a few weeks ago.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said quickly, “she was really old. But when we were at her apartment for shiva, I found this diary she wrote when she was our age. She had a whole bunch of siblings—a twin sister, even—but her parents sent her over to America by herself, to escape the Holocaust.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah.” The sun moved behind a cloud, and goose bumps rose on my bare arms. Some leaves blew across the court and flapped against the bottom of the net. “I’ve been reading her story, and just . . . I don’t know. Thinking about it a lot.”

  “My great-grandpa was on the Kindertransport,” Ethan offered.

  I looked up from my racquet. “What’s that?”

  “It was this program that helped get kids away from the Nazis. No parents, just kids. They took a train to England—all these kids—and foster families took them in. My great-grandpa and his brother went.” He’d been talking quickly, but then stopped. His cheeks got red. “I’m researching it for my bar mitzvah project,” he explained.

  As Anna would say, my insides turned to mush. If only he knew how cool I found it that he was into his great-grandfather’s story; he didn’t need to be embarrassed for my sake. “How old was your great-grandpa?” I asked.

  “When he died?”

  “When he left his parents.”

  “Oh. Nine, maybe? Ten?”

  “Did he ever see them again?”

  “His dad, yeah. His mom didn’t survive. But apparently when he and his brother did finally see their dad again, things were really weird between them.”

  “How come?”

  “It’d been a long time, I guess. They’d all changed.”

  I plucked at the strings of my racquet. That made sense. I assumed happy things would have come if Anna had been able to reunite with her family, but she’d only been away for a couple of months. To see them after a few years, when they’d been in a concentration camp, that would be . . . well, different. If I did find my birth parents, and we reunited after all this time, what would that be like? It could go a million different directions.

  “According to my grandma,” Ethan continued, “he didn’t get along with his foster family very well either. He moved to America to go to college and, like, never talked to them again.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Why didn’t he like them?”

  “I don’t know. But I watched this documentary about the Kindertransport, and it seems like it was pretty common. Some families didn’t really want the kids; they just took them for the money the organization would pay.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Some had kids of their own who were jealous. And the Kindertransport kids had all sorts of stuff to deal with too. It was a new culture. They missed their parents.”

  “They didn’t speak the language,” I added. “They might have looked different.”

  Ethan nodded. I saw him glance at me, the shade of my skin, and then look away, squint through his glasses past the courts and into the trees. “Maybe my great-grandpa’s foster family was fine, but he was angry and wouldn’t have liked anyone. Who knows.”

  We sat there in silence for a while. I thought about Anna’s day at Coney Island, and the photo postcard of her with Max, Hannah, and the others. When it came to adoptive families, Anna and I lucked out, I guess. A lump rose in my throat.

  “Well,” Ethan said finally.

  “Yeah.” I stood up. “I guess I’d better start my private tennis practice.”

  “With no ball,” Ethan pointed out.

  I laughed. Ethan laughed.

  “Hey, what’s your cell number?” he asked. He sounded like he was working very hard to make it seem like it’d only just occurred to him to ask, this very moment. I warned him that my phone is not smart, so he took out his: a flip phone that looked even older than mine. “Our parents went to the same store,” he joked.

  “In the same time machine,” I added.

  He grinned, added my number, and texted me so I’d have his. “Okay,” he said awkwardly. “See you tomorrow.”

  I gave a wave that was sort of like a salute. Then I bent down quickly to gather my stuff and pretend I hadn’t done that. (I mean, really, Imani? A salute?)

  After he disappeared behind the school, I stood there for a minute, enjoying the breeze and wondering how to smooth things over with my parents. I didn’t have the guts to do it with words, but maybe I could do it with actions.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s amazing how productive you can be when you have something to prove. By the time my parents came home from work, I’d done all my homework, including the essay for Mrs. Magill’s class that was due next week. I’d also picked up all the clothes and junk from my bedroom floor, and—for the first time ever—“Hoovered” the carpet without being asked. It was a total coward’s apology, for what I said last night and also for my snooping, which they didn’t even know had happened, but it seemed to do the trick. My parents—cowards themselves, I guess—accepted it without any words, but with an act of forgiveness: tortellini for dinner.

  Friday, October 17, 1941

  Oh Belle,

  I had again a terrible dream last night. I must have been scream
ing, because my throat hurts today. All day I was worried that something horrid had happened, and I think I’m right because I came home to find that all of the letters I’ve sent in the past month came back unopened . . . a terrific stack of them were placed on the desk in my room. Hannah tried to warn about it before I saw, and I could tell she was worried too, but nothing could have stopped the buckle of my knees, or the weight that seemed to push me down to the floor.

  “Not at this address,” the letters say. Why are you not at this address?

  “Perhaps they moved,” Hannah said stupidly. Not even she sounded convinced. I don’t know why she bothered.

  “They could be on their way here,” she said.

  Are you on your way here, Belle? But if you were, Papa would have found a way to telegram, or Mama would have written. I haven’t received any letters in weeks and weeks . . .

  “The war,” Hannah said. “Surely all the mail is held up by the war.”

  The war. It is starting to sound like at home, with the war to blame for everything, all the time. Remember our joke . . . only not really a joke . . . that Mina’s first word would be “Krich”? War.

  Max said he will try to telegram tomorrow (but to what address, if you are not at home?), and Hannah spent all evening telephoning women from the synagogue to see if anyone has a way to get information. We are all afraid. Me most of all.

  Thinking of you always,

  Anna

  Saturday, October 18, 1941

  Belle,

  Still no information. I feel as though the string connecting you and me is stretched thin as a hair, but still intact. I close my eyes and imagine messages flowing across that string, winding their way across holes and objects, like a little marble in a game of Chinese checkers. That’s what I need now . . . that is why I continue to write this diary as though you are here. I need my words in this journal to you, my twin, to be like a game piece, making its way across the stars to chart a path home. It has a long way to travel, and the string may zig and zag, but it will find its way somehow and let me know you are okay.

  Are you okay?

  Sunday, October 19, 1941

  Where are you, Belle?

  We still know nothing. Hannah is every day reading the uncles’ copy of “The Jewish Daily Forward” and even listening to the Yiddish radio station instead of music, but we have no answers.

  I have been trying to think of other things, anything but our family, but it’s impossible. I played with Freddy and other neighbors in the street today, but my head was elsewhere. During a game called Johnny on a pony, I got crushed against a brick wall and I barely realized it, though now I’ve a terrific scrape on my elbow and my neck is sore. Then we played hide-and-seek. When it was my turn to count . . . and I opened my eyes to find everyone gone . . . I realized what a cruel game it is. I didn’t look for anyone. I just ran back to the apartment and cried.

  I wonder how long everyone stayed hiding. They probably think I played a trick on them, and they won’t ever want to play with me again. Well, I don’t care. I’d give up every person I know here for a single breath of news about you and Mama and Papa and Kurt and Greta and Oliver and Mina and Grandmother and Grandfather. Where are you?

  CHAPTER 24

  I stopped Madeline’s hand from turning the page. “Madeline,” I said. It was Friday night, and we were in her basement, reading the diary together again.

  “There’s something I forgot to tell you,” I told her now.

  Madeline looked at me over her reading glasses, expectant.

  “It’s bad news,” I said. “Are you sure you want me to tell you?”

  “Well, now you have to tell me.”

  “Freddy dies.”

  Madeline gasped, and her glasses slid down her nose. “What! When?”

  “Not soon,” I assured her. “He died fighting in the Korean War.”

  Madeline held up one finger. Then she did a quick search on her phone. “June 1950 to July 1953,” she reported, showing me the screen. “So Freddy won’t die for another, like, ten years.”

  I felt like I’d taken a tennis ball to the chest. When I first heard that same information, on the call with Grandpa Fred, ten years seemed like a long time—I’ve only been alive twelve, after all. But right now it struck me as impossibly short.

  “How do you know?” Madeline asked.

  “My grandpa told me. He’s named for him, just like you thought.”

  “No way. Was Freddy his dad?”

  “No,” I said with a weak laugh. “He didn’t really know much about Freddy at all. He just knows that he was named for his mom’s first friend in America.”

  “That’s so cool,” Madeline said. “I wish I was named for my mom’s first friend in America, instead of my great-aunt Mildred.”

  “Aw.” I leaned my head on Madeline’s shoulder. “I bet Mildred was really cool. Maybe she went by Millie.”

  “Nope. Mildred. My dad said she did some killer embroidery, though.”

  I laughed. “My middle name, Harper, is for my dad’s grandma, Hildie. My mom sometimes makes her recipe for kugel.”

  “Hildie sounds awesome,” Madeline said. “She and Mildred would’ve been best friends.”

  I nodded. “For sure. They were probably on the same roller derby team.”

  “When they weren’t making kugel.”

  “Obviously.”

  We heard some footsteps on the stairs. Madeline’s dad. “Hi, girls,” he said. “There’s Thai food upstairs. Come get some when you’re hungry.”

  “Okay,” said Madeline. “Hey, Dad?”

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Yeah?”

  “Did Great-Aunt Mildred make kugel?”

  “Yes!” he said. “Potato kugel.”

  Madeline and I looked at each other, our eyebrows up.

  “It was awful,” Mr. Winter continued. “She was a terrible cook. Her matzo balls were like bricks.”

  Madeline and I both cracked up.

  “It’s true!” he said with a grin. “You needed a steak knife to cut those things!”

  I pictured two old ladies, Hildie and Mildred, hacking at matzo balls with a meat cleaver. The image only made me laugh harder.

  Mr. Winter was on a roll now. “Don’t even get me started on her brisket.”

  Madeline and I fell on top of each other, we were laughing so hard.

  “You girls.” He beamed and shook his head. “Come get some dinner soon, okay?” Then he left us to our laugh fest.

  “Maybe that’s why my Hebrew name is Mayim,” Madeline said between deep breaths. “Millie’s cooking was so bad, you had to wash it down with lots and lots of water.”

  I sighed a happy sigh. Maybe that was true. It was pretty random that Madeline’s Hebrew name meant “water.”

  “Imani means ‘faith’ in Swahili,” I told her. “I looked it up.”

  Madeline looked at me, surprised and eager for more. Then she remembered her promise not to bring up my birth parent search—I could see the restraint it was taking her to honor it. But she did.

  “Come on, Faith Hildie Mandel,” Madeline said, nudging me with her elbow. “Let’s go eat pad thai.”

  Monday, October 20, 1941

  Belle,

  Today at the factory, Max told me why he is always arranging the pelts in different ways. It takes 35 skins to make a short jacket, and 60 or so to make a long coat. But Max knows there must be a way to make a coat using fewer pelts, if we just cut them right. It is like a puzzle that I will help solve.

  Each skin costs $18, so if we can make a coat using 33 pelts for instance, or 30, we will save a lot of money. We could also sell each coat for less money then, so we’ll “undercut the competition” and sell many more coats. I know the uncles would like that!

  Uncle Egg
kept looking up from his desk and peeking at me and Max by the table, not knowing if he should be grumpy or not. (What a decision! He is always grumpy.) It was like he wanted me to be cleaning or running errands to get his money worth, but he also knew it’d be more money if I could help Max figure out this puzzle. I know I shouldn’t need to prove anything to those uncles, but part of me still hopes that if they see how helpful I can be, they will want to send for the rest of you, and very soon. I do want to help Max too.

  Beside, the pelts is a good puzzle. At first it seems like it must be simple. But then you realize that while each pelt can be cut in many ways, they can’t be cut just any way, or else the coat will look ugly. Are larger pieces better, or smaller? The colors must match up, as though the whole coat was made from one animal. We must avoid waste too. That is important.

  Thank you, Max, for giving me this puzzle. It keeps my mind occupied more so than sweeping the floor.

  Wednesday, October 22, 1941

  Mamelikanner . . .

  There is a FISH in the BATHTUB. A horse-drawn cart came down 64th St. with a man selling alive fish. Hannah heard the man ringing a bell and ran out (in her dressing gown!) to buy. A FISH. It is a kind called “pike.” We filled the bathtub with water, and the pike is swimming in there right now, as I write. It will be fish for Shabbat dinner. It will be dead by then . . . yowza, I hope so . . . but I don’t want to know how. Maybe the uncles will kill it. (They complained that it is not a carp, because carp is cheaper. I suppose we have a luxury fish swimming in our bathtub.)

  Oh, how I hate fish. It is making a terrific mess of my stomach, and it is not yet near my fork. This is truly the last thing I need, as I am already so queasy with worry. I suppose on Friday night I can say I’m not hungry because I’m worried. Then I won’t have to eat the fish. Unless I hear from you or Mama or Papa by then . . . if it’s good news I will gobble up the whole pike as though it’s chow mein!