River
Page 16
A rooster crowed in the distance, way behind schedule. We were approaching a cornfield, dense with growth. The plants, which were about our own height, waved and rustled in the breeze. Skirting around the edge of the corn, we came to a hill. Darlene raced to the top; I followed as best I could, willing my heavy feet to speed up. What was wrong with me? I felt I was moving through molasses. I shimmied down the other side of the hill, coming to a stop by an unusually wide and gracious tree where Darlene stood smiling.
“I wanted to show you my favorite tree!” she said, grabbing hold of a sturdy, low-lying branch that stretched out almost horizontally from the thick trunk. “It has the most beautiful flowers in the spring. You must come back and see them—every bloom is perfect!”
Darlene’s voice was so full of feeling I thought she was going to cry. She climbed to a branch halfway up and sat in the comfortable-looking V where the branch joined the trunk.
“Come on! It’s stronger than it looks.” She encircled the trunk with her arm and kissed the tree’s rough bark.
Taking hold of the lowest branch, I gingerly hoisted myself up. I was not in the habit of climbing trees, being a Brooklyn girl. The awful pounding started up in my head; I did my best to ignore it. A few minutes later, I was up there with Darlene. I lodged myself in a second V made by another branch to the side of where Darlene was sitting.
“I’ve never had anyone else here with me,” Darlene said, her eyes shining. “This has always been my own special place. Now it can be ours.”
She reached into the pocket of her pinafore and drew something out.
“Here,” she said, “I want you to have this.”
Darlene placed something into my hand. I looked down to see the little china plate from her precious tea set: the sole surviving piece. The china felt smooth in my palm; I looked, for a moment, at the border of tiny painted roses.
“I told you that no one had ever given me such a beautiful present. When I opened the box, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
I recalled the horror in Darlene’s face when her brother had destroyed her treasure. Now, she was smiling.
“I’ve never had a friend my own age before. Having you is much more special even than the tea set.”
I didn’t know how to thank Darlene. The words got caught somewhere in my chest. As we smiled at each other, I noticed, for the first time here in South Africa, Grandma’s distinctive dimple just beneath the corner of her mouth, off to the side. Her face froze in that expression and made me want to weep. The branches were waving around her in the rising breeze, and now, from the corner of my eye, in ghostly negative, the outline of a rough cabin with a brick chimney shimmered within and beyond the leaves. I turned to see another image, the interior of a vast paneled room with tall doors, elaborate ceiling moldings, and high windows, also transparent, laid over the sky and the trees, shimmering all around us. I recognized the double exposure photographic images at once—we’d seen them in the gift shop at the Belle Meade Mansion, a world away. Before I knew Mama was ill. Before the storms had whisked me away from everything I knew and loved.
Now, instead of the cabin slave quarters and the elegant room inside Belle Meade, I saw Joel’s hut, with his grandchildren cuddling together in sleep on the floor, superimposed onto the outline of Darlene’s schoolhouse, her classmates scowling in the school yard, and pressed up against the chain link fence, the faces of the village children.
Darlene was smiling, still, and she reached out her hand.
“I’m just so happy you’re here,” she said.
“I’ve come from very far away,” I said, tears springing to my eyes, as self-pity gushed through me.
“Well, not so very far,” Darlene said, squeezing my hand.
I shook my head.
“What?” Darlene asked.
“It’s just—well, there are things I can’t tell you,” I said, the tears now falling freely from my eyes. “You see, I’m actually lost. And I’m so afraid—afraid that I’ll never find my way—”
Darlene’s smile fell. Her eyes were hard nubs of determination.
“I have a theory,” she said. “Everyone feels that way. Well, anyone who has any heart and soul. If your eyes are open just a little bit, you have to see that human beings are just about the most awful species on the planet. I’d take the tigers and panthers and lions any day. Joel says you get one life and you don’t choose which one you get given. But that doesn’t mean you can’t—”
“You can’t what?”
“Do the best you can with it.”
Her words held little comfort. I hung my head. A pang of anger spiked my heart and then fanned out and filled me. The world seemed such an awful place; you just had to touch the surface of it to feel the layers of suffering and injustice that went down, down, all the way down.
Yet here was Darlene, who had every reason in the world to feel angry and hard done by, her face alive with gratitude and joy! A little slug of shame crawled through me. Who was I to feel helpless? To give into self-pity? To allow anger to close me up and shut me down?
Darlene smiled again, the dimple popping back into place at an angle below the corner of her mouth.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s remember this moment—let’s remember it always! And make a promise! That in twenty years’ time—no, let’s make it longer! I don’t know, forty years! Wherever we are in the world, let’s write to each other! We can celebrate everything we’ve done in our lives. All the places we’ve visited. We’ll have families of our own! And I’m going to travel all over—really see the world! And—”
My mind clicked with numbers. Forty years from now, Darlene would be fifty-four. She’d be a mother and a grandmother. In fact, that very year would be the year I was born. The year she became the grandmother of me.
“No, we won’t write to each other!” I said, the feel of this perfect alignment of numbers like a plump little treasure in my hand. “We’ll be together! I know it!” I remembered my mother telling me that one of the most precious experiences of her life was having her mother—Darlene, the skinny girl with the curly, dark hair sitting here in the tree with me—coming to spend a month with us soon after I was born.
“Grandma adored you from the moment she set eyes on you,” Mama had said, showing me a photograph of me, a squishy newborn, lying on a mat with Grandma, whose arm was curled around me, her face glowing with the same expression of wonder and joy as I saw now in my friend Darlene’s face!
“We’ll be together, I know it,” I said, smiling at Darlene through my tears. “I can see us, there, on the mat—”
The most perfect thought had formed in my mind like a crystal, shiny and delicate and rock hard, and I was about to say something else, but the words were whisked from my lungs with the sudden crash of wind as an awful vise grip seized my already aching head. My hands flew to my temples, just as I felt the great push from behind and found myself tumbling forward, somersaulting widely, a much greater distance than surely existed between the tree and the dry yellow grass.
The new day, which I’d been so enjoying, with its deepening blue sky and fresh country air, was suddenly eclipsed by a growling thundercloud. The thunderclap that followed slammed against my ears; I thrust the little plate Darlene had given me into my pocket and clamped my hands over my ears, though they were little protection against the sound’s tremendous force. I closed my eyes, gave myself over to the tumbling, aware of tears welling behind my closed eyelids. I tried to keep Darlene’s smiling face in my mind’s eye, wondering what was happening back there for her. Wondering if she knew she had just lost forever her new—her one and only—friend.
Well, not forever, I suppose. If you could call the future, when I would come to her as her granddaughter, some kind of antidote for forever.
Is this why I’d always felt a special bond with Grandma—I wondered as the storm raged around me—because I’d known her in the past? Of course, this thought made no sense. How could I have known her
before I was born—before my own mother was born?
My thoughts scrambled with the great cracking open of time. There was now only the heaving and spinning and pressure of darkness. I waited for the voice of my mother to pierce the terrifying blackness so that I’d know she was watching over me, so that I’d know she was showing me the way. But nothing came—no word, no feeling of care and embrace.
A great, aching loneliness welled up inside. I clenched my fists and prayed. Please, dear God. Help me find home.
CHAPTER FOUR
I AWOKE WITH A FEELING OF mind-numbing exhaustion—the way you feel when you’ve come down with a nasty flu. All of me ached: my muscles, joints, throat, eyes, and most of all my head. With great effort, I heaved open my eyelids, which were crusted together and felt unbelievably heavy.
I saw the shadowy form of a person moving slowly, too fuzzy to make out who it was. A sound, like a rustling of clothing amplified a thousand times, crashed against my ears, painful in its intensity. And great, clanging thuds, the footsteps of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, rattled the windows. I tried to lift my head; a searing pain shot down my neck then on through my spine. For a moment, I felt coolness, wetness, on my forehead. And then, a warm, soft brushing against my cheek. A familiar, pungent scent burned my nostrils and rose into my skull. So familiar, it tugged at my heart and made me want to weep. Grandma! I tried to open my mouth but my jaw was clamped shut. Grandma! The word ricocheted like a hammer banging on the inside of my skull.
I blinked once, twice. Felt myself sinking, as if into warm water, a new heat washing over me as the awful clanging vanished, sinking into silence and calm. The pain in my head evaporated. I drew in a deep breath; all of me expanded with lightness and relief. I blinked again several times, and after a few moments, my eyes were able to focus.
I was in a bed, my face turned toward a wooden wall. The air was heavy with smoke and crackled with the sound of burning logs.
“Finally!” I heard a cheerful young voice say.
I sat up. The voice belonged to a girl who was sitting across the room, poking with an iron at a small fire that was flaring to life in the grate of a broad red-brick fireplace. Hanging above the sputtering flames was a large iron pot, like the cauldrons in storybooks my parents had read me when I was little.
“I’ve been trying to wake you up for the longest time! Come on, we’ve got so much to do!”
What an interesting language! I found myself thinking. Guttural ch’s and rounded, elongated vowels, ouhs and aaihs. It sounded like the German I’d heard on the trip I’d once taken with my father to Heidelberg. I understood perfectly well what the girl was saying, and knew from my recent experiences that, when I opened my mouth to speak, I would find that I, too, would be able to speak the language like a native.
I smiled at the thought of how easy it was, on this journey, to learn languages. If only back home in Brooklyn I could just open my mouth and find myself in full command of an utterly new tongue!
“Go ahead, smile if you want. But I don’t see how me doing what’s left of the work for Erev Rosh Hashanah is exactly funny! You promised to help me. Sarah, you said. I’ll do the lion’s share. That’s why you came, isn’t it?”
She didn’t sound the least bit angry: only amused.
And I was grateful that she mentioned her name, and so quickly: no need to guess.
“Yes, of course,” I said, pulling aside the scratchy blanket and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “It’s cold. You’d think the fire would take the edge off.”
“Well, get dressed, you silly chicken,” Sarah said, laying down the crooked fire iron and picking up a long wooden spoon. She stood to stir the pot and I saw that, though she was petite, she had a strong build; she looked as if she’d have no trouble wrestling me to the ground, if it ever came to that. Her light brown hair was pulled tightly into two braids that fell down her back to her waist. She stirred vigorously with the spoon and the starchy smell of some kind of porridge wafted across the room to where I was sitting. My stomach responded with a loud gurgle.
“The others won’t be back for hours,” Sarah said. “Between morning and afternoon prayers at the shul, they’re having lunch at the Lubovskys. Let’s eat breakfast. Yossele can eat when he’s finished his game.” She looked out into the yard; only now did I register the sounds of children playing.
“Yossele can’t get enough of that game! He and Moishe from next door are at it every morning before cheder. Papa says it helps get the wiggles out so that he has sitzfleisch for Talmud.”
I marveled at my instant understanding of all her Yiddish expressions: cheder—the school for Jewish children, where they taught the Old Testament—Tanakh—and the commentaries of the sages—Talmud. And sitzfleisch: the ability to sit still for long periods of time.
Sarah smiled. “And if you ever decide to get out of bed, you can start the samovar!”
She jerked her head in the direction of a wooden cabinet on which stood the beautiful, shiny brass samovar. Grandma’s samovar! The one that sits in the display area of her wall unit, built especially to showcase it. How peculiar, that Grandma showed me how to use it just before—well, just before I began falling through time. The samovar that her own mother—Sarah!—managed to bring with her from Lithuania when she fled the pogroms and sailed to South Africa.
Sarah. Grandma’s mother. It was startling, looking at this warm, lively girl, to think there was any way she would ever turn into the hard, unyielding woman I’d just left behind in South Africa.
A gray hessian dress was draped across the end of the bed; I pulled it on over the heavy cotton underclothes I was wearing that appeared to double as pajamas.
So, I had gone back yet another generation and now I was here, with Sarah in a small shtetl somewhere in the heartlands of Lithuania, at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the floor, beside the bed, was a pair of coarse leather shoes that looked roughly my size. I glanced over to see that Sarah was wearing similar shoes. I picked them up, noticing the neat little stitches joining the uppers to the soles. The leather laces had the same handmade look. I raised one shoe to my nose to smell the natural leather.
Sarah was serving porridge into two bowls; she looked over to see me sniffing the shoe and gave me an odd look.
“You’ve been wearing shoes made by my father your whole life,” she said.
“I know.” I felt the heat rise to my face. “I just like the smell, that’s all.”
“You are a funny creature, aren’t you,” Sarah said.
I marveled again at how this pretty, good-natured girl could have become the dour woman that had filled Darlene—and me—with fear. What lay ahead for her that might bring about such a dramatic transformation? I knew so little about her; Grandma had never talked of her, except in referring to the treasures she’d passed down—the samovar and the cuckoo clock, and the orange-and-black wedding china. I scanned the room, wondering if I might lay eyes on the cuckoo clock that I’d come to love; my heart leapt a little at the thought that I might hear again its familiar sound. But then I remembered it had been a wedding gift—and Sarah’s marriage still lay some years ahead, in a future that was to me the distant past. The distant past … What an impossible thought that this room, so vivid, in all its antique detail, as real as anything I’d ever experienced, in fact existed almost a century before I was born!
On my way over to the samovar, I paused to look out the window; the uneven glass, set within a lattice of crudely shaped lead, had a greenish hue, with little bubbles trapped here and there within. Beyond the window stretched a dirt yard, dominated by an ancient water pump and a long wooden trough. Beyond the yard stood other simple wooden houses much like this one, each with its own large patch of packed dirt, separated from each other by enormous gnarled trees. The early-morning light was diffuse, almost gray; I was reminded of sepia-toned photographs I’d seen lying in disorderly piles at the antique stores on Atlantic Avenue, back home in Brooklyn.
“Always the daydreamer.” Sarah’s voice snapped me from my reverie.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was watching the boys.”
“You’d never think, looking at him, that Yossele is the star scholar at cheder. He’s such a mischievous pup.”
My heart clutched at the thought of my own brother, Billy, whose sixth birthday was coming up. Oh no! I thought with dismay. I’m going to miss his birthday! Another jolt overcame me at this thought; here I was, still thinking in normal terms about the passage of time—as if it made any sense to think that in a few weeks it would be Billy’s birthday! I was a hundred years away from that date—and from Billy! What could it possibly mean to be one hundred years away from my brother? My head wavered, my knees felt weak, as if I was going to faint; it was all too confusing. Lost in time and space, away from everything—everyone—I loved.
“Anyone would think you want to go out and join the boys with their silly sticks!” Sarah’s voice brought me back to the moment.
“No, I’m too old for that,” I said, aware of how sad my voice sounded.
“You make growing up sound about as glorious as a funeral!” Sarah’s voice rippled into laughter.
The surprise of it—Sarah! With humor bubbling out of her!—snapped me back into the moment of here, now, though I could feel myself fighting it, as if I wanted to stay sad, wanted to keep the thought of my little brother, Billy, close before me. I shook my head, allowed the feel of it all—of the real me, the lost me—to subside. But even as I allowed it to ebb, a tiny, fierce refusal did not allow it to disappear entirely; deep within, I could still feel the dull, aching throb of what I knew was my real life.