Rue des Rosiers

by Rhea Tregebov

  “Stay the night,” he says. “Don’t leave tonight. Stay here.”

  She closes her eyes again, letting the penny turn in her hand. Car ma vie, car mes joies. Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi. Because a new, a joyful life starts with you. What kind of life does she have now, what kind of life does she deserve?

  “It’s crazy,” Michael mutters. “It’s crazy that you won’t stay here with me.”

  ~

  history

  much as sarah liked prof. koenig, the course was hard. Every Tuesday and Thursday before class she found herself clenched. And the dreams, those waking nightmares, had come back, often. There was fodder for them. The something at the door now wore Nazi uniforms. And Sarah seemed to take longer and longer to unfreeze from them. Sleeping Beauty waking slower and slower from the evil spell. It didn’t happen every night after class, but many nights.

  Sarah couldn’t be the only one struggling, because the ranks had thinned: from the twenty-odd students who began the class, there were only about a dozen left. But Helen being there helped, Helen as a barricade on Sarah’s side of the door. Helen as proof, Sarah wasn’t sure of what.

  One day Sarah found Helen’s lucky penny in her jeans pocket and kept it in her hand through class, turning and turning it between her fingers. Another barricade, a distraction. That day Prof. Koenig had written After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric on the blackboard. A quote from Theodor Adorno. Prof. Koenig wanted the students to compose their own responses to the quote, agreeing or disagreeing or simply expanding upon it, 300 words maximum, due next week.

  They were supposed to write 300 words about six words. Writing poetry is barbaric. Maybe writing anything about the Holocaust was barbaric.

  For now they were reading Primo Levi’s memoir about surviving Auschwitz. Levi started writing his book almost immediately after he’d been liberated, words after Auschwitz. But it wasn’t until 1958 that he was able to publish it. Until then, none of his words about Auschwitz were wanted.

  ~

  It was mid-November, only a few more weeks of class before Christmas break. Sarah found Helen in her usual seat at the library. She was wearing moss-green tweed pants and a matching green turtleneck, pearl earrings. She quietly passed Sarah a little paper bag, a present, and Sarah couldn’t resist taking a peek – more of Helen’s cinnamon rugelach. It was hard not to nibble on one right away.

  The class was reading Viktor Frankl’s memoir: “the story of a man who became a number who became a person,” according to the quote on the cover. A man who became a number. Sarah shivered. Frankl’s book came out in Austria right after the war, in 1946; it had sold millions of copies. These words were welcome while Levi’s weren’t. Sarah got through the first few pages when she came to this:

  […] On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.

  The best of us did not return. What did that mean? Sarah had heard other vague, ugly versions of this idea about the grineh, Yiddish for greenhorns, the displaced persons who came to Canada after the war. DP – the acronym itself a slur. Those whose alleged success was attributed to their cutthroat natures because, as Frankl put it, they had lost all scruples in their fight for existence. Grineh. Like so many of her Talmud Torah classmates’ parents. Like Helen. Found guilty simply because they survived. But it wasn’t fair. Wasn’t true.

  Sarah underlined Frankl’s paragraph in pencil. Helen’s head was bent over her book. “Helen,” Sarah whispered, “can you look at this quote?” Helen pulled the book over to her, read the paragraph quickly, then read again slowly, her finger under the lines.

  “The best of us did not return.” She gently touched the page again, spread her fingers across it as if to weigh it down. “What are you asking me, Sarahleh?”

  Did she think it was true?

  Helen sighed. “I know you’re wondering. I was never in the camps.”

  Helen didn’t have a number tattooed on her arm, but Sarah knew that not everyone who was in a camp got a number. She’d been afraid to ask.

  “I was young and strong enough to run east from Poland and I did. Before the Nazis got there,” Helen continued, her voice a whisper in the quiet of the library. “I got to Tajikistan and waited out the war there. It was very hard, very dangerous, we were hungry and cold and afraid, but I was never in a camp.

  “Everyone who lived through the war has a different story, Sarah. People ran to the woods, some joined the Partisans. The Partisans weren’t always angels. People were hidden, children especially, and pretended they weren’t Jews.

  “All this you know, you’re studying this.

  “The people who did go through the camps, that was something separate from everyone else. But whatever people went through, I don’t throw everyone into the same bucket.” Helen looked out across the room, her gaze scanning the students, their heads bent, intent.

  “People who had goodness in them did come back. They walked out of what swallowed them up and still they had goodness in them at the end of it all. I can tell you that every person’s story is a different story. And good luck, or chance, or someone else’s goodness, even for one moment, turning away or looking ahead, one moment of luck or goodness, or many, that’s how people survived.”

  ~

  January, and Sarah was almost used to the dreams, almost every night before class Tuesdays and Thursdays. She tried watching TV till midnight, silly stuff, the old black-and-white movies her mom liked to watch. Sometimes it worked. She told herself she would tough it out. She would prove to herself that she could tough it out, that she was tough enough. The class had one more memoir to read, Night, by Elie Wiesel. It had taken Wiesel ten years before he was able to start writing anything about the camps. For ten years Wiesel’s words were stopped up. No words after Auschwitz, no words for Auschwitz. Night was so small, less than 150 pages, as if Wiesel could just barely get out what he had to say.

  Prof. Koenig was showing a slide of a photograph taken during the liberation of Buchenwald. As always, the room darkened and then brightened. Sarah blinked. The photograph was taken on Monday, April 16, 1945, Prof. Koenig explained, five days after troops from the 80th Division of the American Army entered the camp. The photographer was an American private by the name of Miller.

  The first thing Sarah noticed in the photo was the man standing on the right, leaning against a wooden post in the bunkhouse. His face was framed by a short black beard. His flesh was tight over his bones, and he was naked, but he was holding a striped shirt in front of himself. For modesty’s sake.

  Those pyjamas. How ridiculously innocent those striped uniforms were. Pyjamas like her father’s, Abe, wandering around the kitchen on Saturday mornings, a cup of coffee in his hand. Wiesel must have been just a few years younger than Abe. She pushed the image of her father away, looked back at the slide.

  The standing man was looking upwards, slightly, to the right. Almost everyone else in the photograph was looking directly at the camera.

  All right, then. She was going to look herself. She was going to look into each face: this is a person and this is person and this another person. They were not slave labourers, they were not survivors. They were not about to die, they were not those who had just escaped death. Words would not swallow who they were. They were themselves.

  There was a young man on the bottom bunk at the far left and he looked both frightened and hopeful, astounded by the salvation that he was being offered. Sarah knew by now that the boy had reason to be afraid, because many people who were liberated still died. Some died from the food the well-meaning liberating soldiers gave them, their starvation so extreme that their bodies
went into shock when they ate. Others were just too worn out from malnutrition or typhus or TB to make it through more than a few days, even with the help of the people who’d liberated them.

  Only three men were turned away from the camera, two of them, whose heads were raised – there must have been something other than the camera to look at in the room, perhaps the one man who, Sarah now thought, was so bravely able to stand. She saw now the slight smile on the upright man’s face. The third of the three turned away from the camera had his head down, only his dark hair visible, a blanket tucked tenderly around his neck. Maybe he was too weak to lift his head.

  She saw suddenly that many of the men had something shining with them, a shining metal object set on the surface of the wooden bunk. It was their food bowl, the only possession most prisoners had, a food bowl which they also used as a pillow. A man on the second level of bunks had his arm held protectively over the bowl. He seemed at first to be wearing rimless glasses, but it was just the bags under his eyes and the wise arc of his raised eyebrows. He had something white wrapped around his head, a turban, or bandage. Perhaps he had been wounded. Perhaps he was observant and at last, after liberation, he was allowed to cover his head, and the white fabric was all he had.

  Because of the way the photograph had been framed, Sarah was sure that there were men in the top level of the bunks who had been cut off, whose faces were not in the picture. She wanted to imagine their faces too.

  “We have detailed information on the contents and origin of this photograph,” Prof. Koenig was explaining, “because it is held in the American National Archive, and so the date it was taken, the name of the photographer, are known. We know also that the man at the far right, the far back of the lowest level of the bunks, was Max Hamburger. He did in fact recover, though he was very ill with tuberculosis at the time the photograph was taken. He recovered and became a psychiatrist in the Netherlands.

  “And,” Prof. Koenig went on, “on the second row of bunks, seventh from left, is Elie Wiesel. He was 16 years old.”

  The room darkened and then brightened again, and they were shown a close-up of Wiesel’s face. He looked frightened and serious and sad at the same time.

  That boy’s face.

  The boy who went on to produce the words she had been reading.

  No words after Auschwitz, Prof. Koenig had said. No, it was Adorno who said no poetry. How was Sarah supposed to produce words for her essays? Everything she was feeling and thinking had been thought and felt already, and in a better way. By people who were there. And even for them, words didn’t do enough.

  ~

  February. Sarah was getting a bit more sleep, the dreams weren’t quite as often, though they were just as bad, worse maybe. The class had a major essay due next week, and Sarah had her topic. She was writing about “The Erosion of Civil Rights in Pre-War Nazi Germany.” She was going to discuss the impact of the Nuremberg Laws and of each step that followed, each regulation and prohibition, a progression that made what was inconceivable reality.

  She was turning the penny in her fingers, reading an article about the stamp Jews had to have on their identity cards. Everyone in Germany had to carry an identity card, but in the fall of 1938, a law was passed requiring Jews to have their cards stamped with a red ‘J’ so that they were immediately identifiable. Who was a Jew, who wasn’t – the single red letter told everything. The age-old questioned answered. What is a Jew?

  Even before the ‘J’ stamp, she read, in August of 1938, the Nazi authorities said that any Jews who had first names that weren’t immediately identifiable as Jewish had to add a new middle name to their identity cards. Men had to take Israel. Women had to take Sarah.

  Her own name. The word that meant her.

  If her name was everyone’s name, it was no one’s.

  The Erosion of Civil Rights in Pre-War Nazi Germany. How could she write about this? Words did nothing. How could she put together any words that meant anything? She put down her pen, pushed the journal aside. Started gathering up her books, pushed them into her bag.

  She couldn’t stand being there. Couldn’t stand the library. Helen. Herself. She started pulling on her winter coat, wrapping a scarf around her neck. She couldn’t say anything to Helen, couldn’t find any words for this. It didn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop until the names had been erased, and the stories, and the bodies that went with them. She didn’t want to dream like this. She didn’t want to study the destruction of the Jews of Europe. There were no words that were any good. There was nothing she could do. No good she could do. She wanted to go home.

  ~

  Sarah was in line at the cafeteria in the Student Union Building two weeks later when she felt a light tap on her shoulder. It was Helen, bundled in her navy winter coat, her cheeks pink with cold.

  “Sarah, you haven’t been in class. Were you sick? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not coming to class any more, Helen. I’ve dropped the course.”

  “Dropped? Why would you do such a thing? You did so much work already. Was it the essay? Sarah, talk to me.”

  “It was everything.”

  “What everything? What are you talking about?”

  “I kept having these dreams, bad dreams I couldn’t wake out of.”

  “Sarahleh, dreams are just dreams.”

  “It’s more than that, Helen. I don’t know how to make arguments about the Holocaust. I don’t want to study evil. I don’t want to understand it.” Because it couldn’t be understood. There were no words to frame it. Because there was nothing to be done. Nothing she could do.

  “Sarahleh. Listen to me. You don’t have to understand evil.” Helen’s face was ruddier now, not just with the cold. People were looking at them. She pulled Sarah out of line over to a corner. “Sarah. You know what I’m interested in? I’m interested in goodness, the mystery of goodness. Maybe that’s what you’re interested in too.”

  No. It wasn’t enough. Helen didn’t know what she was talking about. Helen didn’t know anything and Sarah didn’t know anything. If you added one drop of goodness, a tincture of goodness, to all that death, nothing would change. One good act would do nothing. Any good act did nothing.

  “Sarah. Listen to me. You can talk to Prof. Koenig. For sure he’ll take you back. You’re almost finished the work.”

  No. She didn’t want to go back. Nothing she could do or think or write or say would change anything.

  She had only done one thing in her life that ever meant anything – she kept a life from happening – and she didn’t know whether it was wrong or right. Or maybe she knew that it was both wrong and right.

  She couldn’t understand, she couldn’t do anything now.

  “I’m sorry, Helen. I don’t want to. I’m sorry.”

  Helen looked at her, looked down at the floor. “You don’t have to be sorry, Sarah.” She straightened her bag across her shoulders. “You do what you need to do.” The room suddenly brightened, a stray ray of sun lighting up Helen’s face. Sarah could see the makeup on her face, the eyeliner, powder, rouge, lipstick, as though Helen had had to make herself a face. “But you call me if you want to talk about this. You have already my number.” Helen blinked, the light was too hard on her, then turned to the dark room.

  Laila

  I have something from home. Something forgotten in my suitcase until now, my mother packed it for me. A package, wrapped in brown paper. I unwrap it, put it to my face, but it doesn’t smell like home. Not anymore. A square of black cotton, the fabric embroidered in red, green, blue. Cushion cover. A gift from my mother. To make me feel at home here.

  When my mother learned cross-stitch from her grandmother in her village, in our country, she was only seven. And when I was little, I would watch her hands as the designs formed stitch by stich, cross by cross. She’ll work without a pattern, holding the whole in her mind as the needle takes each stitch. She learned everything from her grandmother: hem stitch, stem stitch, satin stitch, chain stitch;
feather stitch, braid stitch, manajel and sanabel stitches. Each for a different purpose: binding, filling, couching, running, tacking. My mother learned everything, knows everything, can do anything with cotton thread. She works evenings, after she finishes in the orchards. For the neighbours’ daughters she makes wedding dresses, spends months on them so that the fabric is thick with colour and pattern. And for us, for the family, gifts: cushions, tablecloths. Into every one she works in symbols for good luck. Good luck, good health. Protection. Peace.

  She told me the names of the patterns: Moon of Bethlehem, Moon of Ramallah, Moon with Feathers. Damask Rose, Garden Rose, Rose in Bud. This is you, Laila, she told me, when I was little. Rose in Bud. Trees too: Hawthorn, Cypress, Tall Palms, Tree with Lions. Apple Tree, False Tree, True Tree, Tree of Scorpions. These are the running border patterns: Eye Wide Open, Dragonfly, Chickpeas & Raisins, Road to Egypt, Frogs in a Pond. Old Man's Teeth, Old Man Upside Down, Bachelor’s Cushion, Baker’s Wife, Chicken Feet. Key of Hebron. Four Eggs in a Pan.

  Good luck. Good health. Protection. She was making a dress for me, she didn’t say wedding dress. Didn’t want to make bad luck, wishing for me. And a wedding could wait, she said. Till things got better. Till I found a way to get more schooling. She used manajel stitching at the neck opening, the sleeve edges. When she was done, there would be embroidered panels all down the front, down to my ankles: roosters in red with blue and yellow cockscombs, hawthorns, cypress. On the chest panel, thick borders of roses and lyres braided into one another. And inside them, diamonds of roses, red and pink on the white cotton, a rose in bud at each corner, damask rose at the centre. Turn a diamond on its side and it’s a square. That was the pattern my mother intended for me. Some kind of order, some kind of beauty I could put myself inside.