Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  Bela didn’t look up from his work, and Menachem and Rivka looked at the letters from all over the world, with their tattered envelopes and beautiful stamps, and felt all their courage drain away in the face of the important work this old man must be doing. Rivka gestured towards the photographs: a thick, cracked tintype of a bride clinging to the arm of an enormous groom, a more recent picture of a dark-haired girl in an Arab gown with a mischievous smile on her face. Then there was the photograph of a woman holding a baby boy.

  In spite of herself, Rivka said, “Oh, please, if we could only have a photograph of Leah!”

  Looking up then, Bela set the pen down. “Get the fuck,” he said, “out of my room.”

  Faced with this response, how could they help but obey, and they ran back to the dining hall where they told the other young people that Bela was a man of great feeling, emotionally honest, an authentic individual. Menachem and Rivka had never felt so small and foolish. What did the others think? They talked through supper, and then afterwards they had some juice and then some coffee, and then they took a brisk walk. They talked and talked, and then the redheaded boy took out his guitar and they sang until their voices gave out, and then they talked some more. They talked the way Bela and Dori had once talked instead of making love. Or did some of them make love? It’s possible.

  3

  HAVING LOUISA over on the evening of Shavuot was unexpected agony. Rabbi Needleman admitted: The girl tried. Yet the tension between her and his wife was undeniable. They had never met before, and now they were deliberately thrown together for hours, as Sharon tried to teach Louisa how to prepare the house for Shavuot.

  Part of the trouble was Sharon’s Hebrew, which was stumbling and abrupt. Rather than explaining things in the sort of detail Louisa preferred, she could only say, “Don’t open that.”

  Louisa would ask, “Why not? What’s behind there?” in a peevish voice, like a bored schoolgirl, and then she would add, “But how do you keep the dishes clean enough? Your water isn’t properly hot. I thought the whole idea of kosher was to make everything clean.”

  Shmuel heard all this from the next room where he very deliberately kept his nose inside a book. Meanwhile, he could also hear Naomi and Shoshana, industrious and oblivious, arranging green branches around the windowsills and doorways, and probably shoving Louisa out of the way. Sharon didn’t correct them as she should have, but only said to Louisa, “Watch. Good girls.”

  “I can’t tell what they’re doing. Why are they bringing in those dirty things?”

  And so on. Once seated, the two of them seemed to have decided to say nothing to each other. Naomi prattled on about a friend’s kitten, and Shoshana made Naomi eat all her beans, while Joshua sat at his father’s side, discussing his day at school, and little Moshe fell asleep at the table with his chin buried in his tiny pieces of noodle pudding. All in all, it would have served as a picture of complete family harmony, if it weren’t for the expression on his wife’s face. Louisa didn’t touch her own noodle pudding or sour cream and vegetables, but she did eat bread and honey and other things which hadn’t come out of the kitchen.

  They rushed through the Grace after Meals, and Sharon made it clear Louisa did not need to help wash up. This left her sitting alone at the women’s end, with the stained, crumb-flecked tablecloth in front of her, pinned into place. Shmuel, Joshua, and the sleeping Moshe sat far away, and in the deep silence even Joshua stopped talking, and looked depressed.

  Then Naomi stuck her head in from the kitchen, and addressed Louisa in Hebrew. “You want to see the kitten?”

  Louisa looked as though she was going to cry. “Where is it, Naomi?”

  “Next door,” Naomi said.

  Louisa said, “I would like very much to see it.” She pushed her chair back and turned to Shmuel, and she asked him in German, “Is it all right? Am I allowed?”

  “What do you think?” Shmuel asked, and at once he wanted to kick himself, but he added, quickly, “Of course you’re allowed, Frau Gratz. No question.”

  So Shmuel watched Louisa take the hand of his youngest daughter. Naomi’s dark hair hung in curls. She was a slight little thing with a sweet, round face, the image of Sharon when he’d met her. Next to her, Louisa looked like a rough, Teutonic giantess. Naomi led Louisa through the hallway and when Shmuel heard the door close behind them, he felt as though a weight had been lifted, and he pushed back his own chair and walked to his study.

  He wasn’t sure when his neighbors would arrive. There would be no more than six of them, and he’d already pulled books from the shelves and laid them on a table. Traditionally, the first night of Shavuot was spent studying the Torah. Lights burned until dawn, and then, in shul, the women scattered myrtle and fragrant branches in the aisle to keep them awake through the day of prayer and to refresh them for the second night, which would be spent reciting Psalms. Some time passed, and he was so engrossed in what he was reading that it took a moment for his eyes to focus on the figure in the doorway.

  Louisa looked shaken. “I’m sorry,” she said at once. “I’m going home now. I just wanted to say goodnight.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Shmuel said. “Not unless you did something wrong.”

  “Maybe I have. I don’t know,” she said. Then, as though testing water, she took a step into the study. “You and the men, your friends, you read all night?”

  “All night,” said Shmuel. He gestured towards an empty seat, though he at once had second thoughts. What would the others think if they found the two of them alone together?

  Louisa arranged herself on the chair and asked, “What are you reading?”

  “Why don’t you guess,” Shmuel said.

  “It’s in—is that Hebrew?”

  “Aramaic,” Shmuel said. “Commentary. But on something you know. Take a look.”

  Clearly, Louisa hadn’t entered the study to try to read Aramaic, but dutifully she took the book and let her eyes pass over the characters. She asked, “Do all Jews know a lot of languages?”

  Shmuel smiled. “Sharon only knows Yiddish. You’ve heard her Hebrew.”

  “I feel awful about your wife,” Louisa said.

  “Ah, she’s no weakling. With four kids, you think she can’t handle you, Louisa?”

  Louisa fiddled with the pages of the book. “That’s not exactly what I mean.”

  “You’re looking at a commentary on the Psalms,” Shmuel said, and he reached for the book. “Shavuot is the day King David was born, and it was the day he died. He was a singer, like you. And a composer, like your husband.”

  He opened the actual Psalter, and as he scanned psalm after psalm, he noticed how each seemed to lapse into a litany against the enemies of Israel. He paused at number Twenty-four, and read:

  The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof;

  The world and they that dwell therein.

  For He has founded it upon the seas

  And established it upon the floods.

  Louisa stared across the table, and she seemed suddenly too big for the chair; perhaps it was the effect of reading too much Aramaic, or of nervous fatigue. He felt a sudden urge to ask her to sing. When had he first known that she was a singer? Had he been informed by someone in the camp, had she told him herself, or had he simply paid too much attention to the Keats and sensed in her a radiant song? Kol Isha. The Voice of Woman. The wise rabbis forbade a man from hearing Kol Isha.

  Helpless, he said, “You must know the Psalms.”

  Louisa said, “I don’t know anything, Rabbi.”

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Shmuel said. “This is all new to you.”

  Louisa said, “No. It’s not new at all.”

  Her tone of voice shook Shmuel, and again he could hear, in it, a little of that singing voice. He sensed she meant more than she said. This time, he wasn’t sure how he could change the subject.

  “I’ve always done things wrong. I can’t move without breaking something. I can’t kno
w my place. And nobody forgives me.”

  Shmuel said, “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “I don’t know,” Louisa said.

  “Listen, listen to the rest,” Shmuel said.

  Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord?

  Who shall stand in His holy place?

  He that has clean hands and a pure heart.

  He shall receive a blessing from the Lord.

  Such is the generation of them that seek after Him

  That seek your face, even Jacob.

  He wasn’t sure what effect he’d hoped the words would have on Louisa. What was meant by “clean hands”? Were clean hands even possible? Yet what he wanted most, he knew, was to pass the psalm on like a blessing. Let Louisa stand before Sinai, like the Hebrews in the wilderness, and if she would receive what God gave there, the way was open to her. She would be blessed. Shmuel might remind her, too, that King David was the descendent of a Moabite maiden named Ruth, a woman from a cursed people.

  All of this he might have said, but Louisa spoke first.

  “Rabbi,” she said, “no one is coming here tonight.”

  Shmuel looked up then. He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not coming into this house,” said Louisa, “because I was here. Even if I go, they won’t come, not tonight. You know, they left me on the sidewalk, playing with that kitten, and it was so small and warm and its heart was beating and all I could think was, why can’t we be like the dumb animals?”

  Her voice was ragged now, and Shmuel wasn’t sure what he’d do if she started to cry. The whole situation was insanely inappropriate. He should not be alone in a room with this girl, not in an office at the camp, nor in his own home. She clearly expected something from him.

  Perilously, Louisa went on. “I’m not a dumb animal. No one,” she said, “will love me like that. For no reason. And no one will forgive me.”

  Shmuel forced himself to ask, “What is there to forgive?” And he thought: What does she want from me? At the same time he knew. She wanted love. It radiated from the girl like ozone.

  “Christ would forgive me,” Louisa said. “He forgives everyone. How do Jews live without that? What do they do?”

  Helpless with pity and revulsion, Shmuel rose from the table, and said, “We forgive each other, Louisa.” Then he left her in the strong light of the study, trembling and isolated. He hoped she would find her own way home.

  I LEFT GAN LEAH AT sunset. Dori saw me off. First, she’d given me her own tour of the remains of the old kibbutz. She found us both pairs of high boots, which allowed us to tramp through the mud without fear. There wasn’t much to the old Tilulit, no chicken coop, certainly. The children’s dormitory was the only building that hadn’t been bulldozed to make way for vineyards. “Good soil for grapes,” Dori said. “You’d think, all us Hungarians, we would have figured that out years ago. But then again, we didn’t have the valley or the other fields back then.”

  We watched the end of the children’s show, a comic pantomime where a fat girl with one gigantic ash eyebrow was clearly imitating Nathan Sobel, and there was a lot of business with a milking machine and a carrot that I couldn’t understand. We must have missed some sort of harvest-dance. Grains of barley still littered the stage.

  The boy who’d offered the ride at lunch must have had second thoughts, because he seemed put out. He spoke Yiddish and had been less than two years in this country, but that didn’t keep him from acting as though he were doing me the biggest favor in the world. By the time Dori and I made our way back to the parking lot, he had the motor running, and stood by the passenger door with a smirk on his face. Dori gave him a cuff behind the ears and said something to him in Hebrew, which she translated, for me, into Hungarian. “I told him you were related to Hannah Szenes.”

  I smiled. “That ought to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Nora,” Dori said, “are you still going to look for him? Because you probably could find him if you went through the military. He was on active duty, last time I heard from him, and I’m sure he’s still in the reserves. I’m surprised your friend didn’t suggest it.”

  My friend? I realized she meant Levin. Levin was home by now, eating a dairy supper with his daughter and his wife. He would look in the next day, surely; how could he not? He’d wear his wrinkled shirt and trousers, with his steel-wool hair brushed back, and his thick eyebrows making him look ironic whether he wanted to or not. Maybe he’d take my arm as he led me to his office, and after that something closed on my imagination like a trapdoor, and I said to Dori, “If I was going to look, I’d need to know his new name.”

  “All those years,” Dori said, “he wrote you as Bela, and no one else called him Bela. He must have wanted there to be someone left in the world who called him that. But I think I’d tell you his name now, if you’d ask.”

  Even as she gave me a kiss goodbye, I wasn’t sure if I would ask that name. If I had his new name, I would have my cousin, and against that having, something, again, closed like a trapdoor. I felt blind panic for a moment as Dori released me and I climbed into the passenger’s side of the car.

  It was a small car, and smelled like horse-manure, or more likely the boy smelled like horse manure. He was a skinny boy, with no chin, buck teeth, and a long, hooked nose. He hadn’t smirked since Dori had given him the line about Hannah Szenes. In Yiddish, he asked: “How far?”

  “Less than an hour,” I said.

  “Ah good. I’ll make it back before the party then, if the car holds out.” He gunned the accelerator, and the bones of the automobile gave a shake. “You ever pray?”

  I shook my head.

  “Learn to pray now. It wouldn’t be funny for either of us if this broke down in the middle of nowhere. Especially after dark. You get the creeps near all those empty villages.”

  In fact, as twilight deepened, the moon threw light on clusters of houses scattered among the hills.

  “Villages without people,” the boy said.

  I asked, “Where are the people?”

  He shrugged and said, “You’re the people, the new ones coming here. But the trouble is, most of you don’t want to be out in the country. You want your buses and your hat shops and your tobacconists. Not you, I mean,” he said, turning a little in his seat. “I’m talking about the others, the sabonim.”

  I asked him, “What is this sabonim?”

  “The word means soap,” he said, showing some teeth. He shook his head. “Like the soap the Germans made out of the ones they gassed. What can you do but make a joke? I was in Treblinka. I know it was no joke. But we can’t all be Hannah Szenes. We can’t all die under torture. And if we go on and live, they think we’re soap anyway. Pretty good joke, huh?”

  “Pretty good joke,” I said. I reached into my bag and took out the last of my Lucky Strikes. I could tell this young man wanted me to offer him one, but what was I supposed to do, break it in half? I had some trouble lighting up, what with the wind coming through the car window, and I cupped my hand around the match and sucked the flame in with all of my strength before it turned to smoke.

  In the accumulating silence of the car, I took that cigarette between my fingers and its far end was a point of light, unreachable, yet close enough to singe my fingertips. Time thickened; how long could one cigarette last? Where would I be when it was gone? When we reached the camp, the boy gave me a nod. “Goot Yawntev,” he said. He didn’t pull into the gate, and the minute I was out the door, off he went without looking back to see if I’d reached the barrack. Maybe he didn’t think the gesture necessary. After all, what was it to him whether I lived or died?

  It must not have been very late when I got back from Gan Leah, but nothing stirred. In fact, the whole of the transient camp felt deserted, like one of the villages without people, or like a cemetery. Somehow, I could not bring myself to go inside the barracks. It would mean opening a door and stepping into the dark, and I didn’t have the strength. There was a cinderbl
ock under a floodlight, and I sat on it, untied my hat, set it on my knees, and waited for I do not know what.

  I felt dry heat behind me. I didn’t want to turn around, but then the voice: “Nagymama, Goot Yawntev. You enjoyed your field trip?”

  “Berkowitz,” I said, not turning to look at him, “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Too bad. I like a little lively conversation. Gyere ide, Nagymama. Come on. I’ve got a fire going.” He gave my shoulder a tug, and I gave way and faced him. He was still wrapped in his leather jacket, with the fur hat pulled down low. His sour, cunning face glistened with sweat.

  I said, “I’d sooner sit here. Too hot for a fire.”

  “Sajnos. Too bad. Those little girls from Transylvania are sorting through a few odds and ends,” said Berkowitz. “Including something that might interest you.” Now he gestured towards a faint shimmer past the barracks. “Cleaning house. They found a nice home at a religious kibbutz. Excellent human material.”

  “Soap,” I said.

  Berkowitz gave a powerful snort, and with both hands he wrenched me from my cinderblock. I resisted enough to feel a little rattled, and the cement grazed my hip. “Come on, Nagymama. Don’t you want to say goodbye to those little édes lányok?”

  “Sweet girls? What’s your idea of sweet?” I asked him. Yellow light played off his jacket folds and his torso shimmered and blurred like butter in a pan. “I’m worn down, Berkowitz. I’m in no mood for sentimental farewells.”

  “They want to say goodbye to you,” Berkowitz said, “and also, we have to have a talk, we should have had a talk long ago, because I need to know your intentions.”

  I managed to ask, “My intentions?”

  “Don’t sound like such a Jew with the questions. I mean your intentions.” He stopped me short, pushed me at arm’s length, and raised his hat a little, freeing his eyebrows, which stood up like a ruff. “I mean, why are you farming her out to such small cheese as rabbis and orange-pickers?”

  I felt wary. “You’ve been following her?”