The History of Soul 2065

by Barbara Krasnoff

  Sheila gaped at the little girl, wondering for a moment if she had gone completely insane. The small face screwed up into a grimace of fear, and began to wail.

  Then she knew.

  The child continued to weep, a despairing sound that rammed itself into Sheila’s soul. She wiped her eyes, ran over and picked the little girl up, holding the child against her shoulder and bouncing her gently.

  ”There, there,” Sheila murmured, stroking the silky hair, thinking of the hard tomorrows that would be faced by that fragile little being. “It will be all right. It isn’t as bad as it looks. I promise.”

  The Red Dybbuk

  Marilyn’s story continues

  2008

  Marilyn wanders among the tombstones. The Long Island cemetery, a place for the Jewish dead for generations, is crowded with graves; appropriate, she thinks, for those who lived their lives crowded in the cities.

  The grounds are so vast that guests come with maps in hand. Most drive to a specific section, park halfway on the grass (trying not to violate one of the graves), and make their obligatory visit, leaving small stones as markers of their presence. But Marilyn doesn’t need a map—after losing both grandparents, her father and her brother, she usually parks at the cemetery’s main gates and strolls to the section where her family lies.

  It’s hard to miss. Marilyn knows she’s come to the right place when she spots, high against the early afternoon clouds, a statue of a woman in coveralls, fist thrust to the sky. She continues slowly, unhurried, careful to avoid a small funeral some yards away, where about 15 people stand and chant Kaddish. Otherwise, on this weekday afternoon, she is alone.

  She walks through the small, rusty gate that marks the beginning of the section. Other areas were sponsored by synagogues or organizations based around whatever Eastern European town the family escaped from (one of the first tasks on any immigrant Jew’s list was to make sure they had somewhere respectable to bury their dead). But this piece of land was bought by a union of fur workers. The union was eventually purged of its radicalism during the 1950s when union officials began to court respectability—and needed to avoid the taint of being Communist fellow-travelers. But the graves, and the memories they evoke, remain.

  She runs her hands along faded carvings of Jewish stars, upraised hands, and hammers and sickles, and haltingly reads Yiddish poems by long-dead writers foretelling the triumph of the working class. Finally, she stops by a modest black stone that has no verse or statue, but just two names, two dates, and two small, oval black-and-white photos. A round-faced young woman and a stocky, balding man stare solemnly out at a long-dead photographer.

  “Grandma,” she says to the woman, and then, in halting Yiddish, “Bubbe, what have you done to our baby?”

  * * *

  “I know you’re not going to like this, but I’m leaving college.”

  Marilyn stopped chopping celery and stared at her daughter. Keep calm, she told herself. You knew that something was coming. She’s 18, she’s the age at which she’s going to make you insane.

  “May I ask why?” Marilyn said, trying to keep her tone even.

  Annie, her baby, her only child from a marriage that faded long ago, was still not fully grown in Marilyn’s eyes, but all long legs and arms and flyaway hair. The girl reached out and took a piece of celery in an obvious attempt to be casual, but Marilyn could see her hand was trembling slightly. “Well, last weekend I went to great-grandma’s grave—you remember, you told me that I should go there to see some family history? And I saw all the graves of the people who spent their lives fighting for what they believed in, and I became ashamed of how I was wasting my life. I’m going to live here for a while, take some courses in Somali and French, maybe in farming or first aid. Refugees are starving while we play student and teacher; I can’t sit by while that happens.”

  “I see.” Marilyn put down the knife, not only so she could give her daughter her full attention, but because she suspected that it was not the best time to have a knife in her hand. “What brought this on?”

  Annie shrugged. “I just realized that I was wasting my life sitting around in classrooms listening to a bunch of overpaid bourgeois tutors tell me how to spend my life as a willing victim of American consumerism.”

  Since Annie had, until recently, been a very willing consumer of media players, computer games, expensive shoes and the occasional tattoo, Marilyn was a bit worried. Also, since when was her daughter using words like “bourgeois”?

  She placed a solicitous hand against the girl’s forehead. “Are you feeling well?” she asked. “Are you running a temperature?”

  Annie pulled away irritably. “I’m fine,” she said. “Really, mom!” and she flounced off, taking a loud bite out of the celery stalk.

  * * *

  “She’s going through a phase,” said Marilyn’s sister-in-law Joan when they met at the Ginger Cafe the next Sunday. “Don’t you remember what you were like at that age? You can’t do anything by degrees—you have to immediately jump in the deep end. It’s like that vampire TV show that she and her friend Rachel are so nuts about and can’t stop discussing. Now Annie’s added politics to the mix.” She stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “It could be worse. She could have found religion and ended up sleeping with some middle-aged guru out in Oklahoma like Sarah’s daughter.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Marilyn said, shocked and appalled. “My baby wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “Your baby is a human American girl, and so is going to do at least one or two crazy things before she settles down and becomes a boring adult,” said Joan, smiling. “If all she does is get a social conscience and perform a few good deeds, all to the better.”

  Marilyn, whose mother had lost her teaching job during the McCarthy era and who, as a result, could never rid herself of a sneaking fear of doing anything that might place her name in a file somewhere, just nodded and mentally crossed her fingers. Hopefully, the phase was indeed a phase, and would be over before Annie could get herself in trouble. Or actually leave college.

  * * *

  Marilyn sits cross-legged in the narrow grassy lane in front of the grave, slips off her backpack, reaches in, and pulls out an old, perilously yellowing album. She places it on her lap and opens it to the first photo. Three children stand stiffly in uncomfortable poses, carefully groomed for what must have been a special occasion for turn-of-the-20th-century youngsters.

  “You want a prayer?”

  She looks up. An elderly man in a worn faded suit, a small yarmulke askew on his balding head, stares at her disapprovingly. “You want a Kaddish?”

  Of course, she thinks. As a woman, she can’t say Kaddish; for a small fee, this man will say it for her. She is tempted for a moment—what could it hurt?—but thinks then of what her grandmother would say. “No, thank you,” she replies, putting a slight edge in her voice to warn him not to press his case. He shrugs eloquently and moves on.

  Marilyn looks back at the photo. A ten-year-old boy in short pants and cap holds the hand of his sister, eight years old and already showing the stubborn press of lips that, Marilyn remembers, lasted into old age. The girl, in turn, clutches the hand of her younger brother, a toddler with long curls and a sweet smile.

  All gone now. They, and most of their children.

  Marilyn puts out a finger and lightly touches the head of the little girl. “I wanted to bring you the blue ribbon that your friend gave you,” she says. “But I couldn’t find it. I’m sorry.”

  The girl glares back defiantly.

  * * *

  The police station was a lot less frightening than Marilyn had imagined it to be, although it was just as seedy. The lawyer hired by the organization for which Annie had been demonstrating seemed to be a nice young man; Marilyn took his card and made a mental note to call her own lawyer when she got home.

  It only took about 15 or 20 minutes for Annie, pale but determined, to emerge from a far door and walk over to her mother. A bored s
ergeant gave Marilyn a receipt for her bail. “Make sure she shows up for the hearing,” he said, staring with tired disapproval at his pen, which seemed to be misbehaving, “And don’t worry about it—the judge will most likely just throw a fine at them and lecture them for a few minutes, depending on how busy he is. Here’s your receipt. Next.”

  It wasn’t until they were in the car and at least a mile from the police station that Marilyn felt secure enough to say, “For God’s sake, whatever possessed you to confront those protesters?”

  Annie stared ahead stubbornly, with a new set to her shoulders that Marilyn found weirdly familiar. “Prejudice against any group is prejudice against us all. Those small-minded bigots claim to be against terrorism, but they are using a tragedy as an excuse to terrorize those in our society who don’t conform to their narrow definition of what is American.”

  “Why didn’t you just start a Facebook group, or send some emails to your representatives, or do something digital?” asked Marilyn, wearily. “Why did you have to start tearing up their signs? Didn’t you think that somebody might try to stop you? Like, say, the police?”

  Her daughter shrugged and continued to look out at the road in front of them. There was a haunted look in her eyes that make Marilyn’s stomach clench.

  “Honey,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Are you all right? Did anything happen in jail that you need to tell me about?”

  “I’m fine,” Annie said. “Just fine. Everybody was very polite. Except for one miserable son of a bitch who felt it necessary to push one of our group so she fell and skinned her knee. Of course, he chose the woman of color to pick on, the goddamn racist schmuck, a feier zol im trefen.”

  Marilyn swerved the car into the other lane and almost clipped an SUV, whose driver cursed her silently behind his windows. She took a breath, kept her eyes on the road, and said steadily, “Honey, where did you learn that phrase?”

  “What phrase?”

  “The one you just used. ‘A feier zol im trefen.’ It means ‘A fire should burn him.’ Where did you learn that?”

  Annie closed her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m tired, Mom. I’m going to take a nap, if you don’t mind. We can do the whole mother-daughter you’re-in-trouble-thing later, okay?”

  That evening, Marilyn sat on her front porch and stared out into the yard, where a few of the first fireflies of the season were trying out their neon. The sound of her very American daughter cursing out the police in Yiddish kept running through her brain. Then something occurred to her. “I suppose it’s possible,” she told the insects. She pulled out her mobile phone. “Hey, mom,” she said when it was picked up on the other end. “Can I ask you something?”

  There was a pause. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, mom. I just wanted to ask you. When you were babysitting Annie, when she was small, how much Yiddish did you use with her?”

  “What’s wrong with Annie? Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine. But she used a Yiddish expression today that I’d never heard her use, and I was wondering—did you ever use the expression ‘A feier zol im trefen’ in front of her?”

  There was a short offended silence. “Of course not! You know I’d never curse in front of a child. Your grandmother Chana, may she rest in peace, used that expression a lot, especially when she was talking about her enemies. And she had a lot of enemies. But she died before Annie was born, didn’t she?” A pause—her mother’s memory wasn’t what it used to be these days. “Of course, she did. Annie was named after her—how could I forget something like that? Although why you Americanized her name to Annie, I’ll never understand. And she has your grandmother’s eyes.”

  * * *

  The next album has photos of Marilyn’s mother, in calf-length dresses and high heels, dark lips that would have been bright red if the photos had been in color, grinning at long-dead young men in jaunty WW II uniforms. Marilyn turns to the last page: her mother’s mother, now middle-aged, hands thrust into the pockets of a long fur coat as if to keep them still. There is a look of grim satisfaction on her face—she is obviously determined to enjoy the moment if it kills her.

  “You loved that fur coat, didn’t you, bubbe?” Marilyn says out loud. “You always said that Grandpa had ruined his hands curing furs for rich women to wear, and you were determined that at least one of those coats would end up on the back of somebody who actually deserved one. And then you gave it to me, your beloved granddaughter, and I refused to wear it because it was seal, and they were clubbing seals in the Antarctic. Cause versus cause, and who wins in the end?”

  Living and dead smile at one another.

  * * *

  Marilyn had finally gotten around to reading that week’s NY Times Magazine section, one eye on the umpteenth rerun of Casablanca on cable, when the front door opened. “Annie, is that you?” she called out. “Did you remember to pick up the milk I asked you to get?” There was no answer, just some footsteps in the direction of the bathroom. Marilyn stood. “You forgot, didn’t you? Was it that hard to just write down…” and she stopped short at the bathroom door.

  Annie was sitting on the closed toilet seat, a bloody washcloth pressed to her temple. There was dried blood under her nose and around her mouth, a cut on the bridge of her nose, and scrapes all along the side of her face and left arm. She was a mess.

  “Oh, my god.” Marilyn ran over and pulled the washcloth from her daughter’s head. The cut was long and ugly looking, but didn’t look very deep. Marilyn opened the bathroom closet, grabbed a roll of gauze, dampened a piece and began to carefully clean off her daughter’s face. “Honey, what happened? Are you dizzy? Are you feeling sick? I think we’d better get you to the hospital–”

  “I’m fine, mom,” said Annie wearily. “Really. I just…We were just trying to keep some squatters from being evicted from an abandoned building, and we thought the man who owned it would at most call the cops, but instead these three thugs, these shtarkers, came and threw us out, and I fell down the stairs….” She started to cry quietly.

  Marilyn didn’t bother with any more details. She got her pocketbook and her coat, guided her daughter to the car (there was no resistance) and took her to the emergency room. She told the receptionist and the doctors that Annie had been in the city, and tripped at the top of some steps, and was brought home by friends (all of which was true, in a sense). Annie needed a couple of stitches in her head, and there was a chance her nose might be broken. (“Let the swelling go down,” the doctor said, not all that interested in what to him was a minor case, “and then go see your regular doctor.”) But that was all.

  They got back around 1 a.m. The entire time—sitting in the waiting room, in the examination room, in x-ray—Marilyn just talked about everyday things: Calling Annie’s friends to tell them she’d be staying home for the next couple of days, whether Annie could still go on a march that she had planned to attend in D.C. that weekend, Marilyn’s plans to visit a cousin the following month…

  Only once, when they were driving back from the hospital, did Marilyn venture a question. “Baby,” she asked, “why did you go there? Didn’t you realize what kind of people you were dealing with?”

  Annie took a deep breath, and for the first time that evening, there was a tremor in her voice. “I don’t know, mom,” she said. “I just…I don’t know. It’s just that…well, it’s just that I have to help, I have to do these things. I just…”

  Then suddenly she lifted her head and looked directly at her mother. “Somebody has to relieve the miseries that are inflicted by the ruling classes,” she said, clearly and steadily. “If your generation chooses to ignore these ills, then it is up to mine. If your values don’t include working for change and for the betterment of humanity, then mine do.”

  Marilyn stared back at her daughter. The girl’s voice had acquired the Russian Jewish lilt that Marilyn remembered from her childhood, the same intonation
s that her grandmother had used all her life.

  * * *

  The last album is Marilyn’s, from her childhood and young adulthood. She pages through well-remembered photos. Her father sits in their living room playing Woody Guthrie tunes on an acoustic guitar to a crowd of fascinated children. A tiny version of her brother Morris (now dead of the same cancer that killed their father, dammit) stares in solemn fascination at an electric train. Long-haired college kids dance enthusiastically in Washington Square Park. And a stocky woman in her 60s with white hair stands in a queue of older folks and students and grins sardonically at the camera.

  “That was the afternoon I took you to see that Yiddish film,” Marilyn tells her grandmother. “The Dybbuk. From the Ansky play? I’m sure you must remember it. About the poor yeshiva bochur, the scholar, who is not permitted to marry the girl he is promised to because of the greed of her parents, and who dies and then inhabits the body of his beloved. It is a fable, you said, of how money corrupts the older generation, and how only the dedication and passion of the younger generation can overcome their greed.”

  She drops the folder, kneels, and puts her hand against the stone. “But, bubbe, when the scholar Channon inhabits the body of Leah, it is with her consent, and it is two young people coming together after they have been told they can’t marry. You are of another generation, another world, and you can’t know what it’s like for the children of Annie’s generation.”

  There is a brief flutter as a nearby pigeon is startled away. Leaves crunch behind her and Marilyn looks up, embarrassed to be caught by some stranger. But it’s Annie, standing tall and angry amid the tombstones and the dead.

  Marilyn quickly stands. “Honey, I told you to pick me up around 5 p.m. It can’t be that late yet.”

  “Is the fight all that different, even today?” Annie asks in quick, unaccented Yiddish. “Or has it simply been twisted by men in power who have used their money and influence to make socialism a curse word, to make cooperation and consensus a thing of the past, to make each worker a pawn in every government’s fight to stay in power? Look around you. Are people not losing their jobs? Not being driven from their homes? How many people around the world have become statistics, irrelevant except as weapons in the wars of those who consider themselves better?”