Kantika, page 11
The rest—earning enough to provide for him and contribute to the household, rushing home after work at the atelier where she has rented a corner for her sewing machine to greet a baby who bats her away, covering up for her absent husband—is a grind, and though she has never been an angry person, something shifts during the first year of her son’s life. Her voice grows stronger, her stride longer. She is hungry all the time from nursing David and hasn’t shed the weight she put on when she carried him, but while she might appear softer to the world, a curvy, well-dressed young mother, baby on her hip, inside she is wraith thin, focused, hard.
She pulls away from Palomba, who can’t go two minutes without providing justifications for Luis’s bad behavior. She pulls away from her father, who disapproves of a young lady working all the time, and whom she silently blames for the mess her family is in. She even distances herself from her beloved mother, jealous of David and Sultana for how they exchange smiles and coos and are each other’s daily companions in the kitchen, garden, park. If, on an evening or weekend, Rebecca is holding David and he fusses, she is quick to hand him off to her mother. Just jiggle him a little, give him something to play with, her mother will suggest. Or sing—he loves your songs! So Rebecca sings, and David wails, reaching for his avuela, tracking her every motion with his eyes. Just take him, Mama, please, I have a dress to finish. And I’m not in the middle of making dinner? her mother will retort, but in the end she always takes the baby. My little shadow, she murmurs close to David’s ear when she thinks no one is listening. My precious boy.
Of course she has her own loneliness; they all do.
II
1927
NOW AND AGAIN, LUIS RETURNS. Rebecca never knows when it will happen—he rarely sends letters—but she’ll come home from work ready to wolf down some food, nurse her son and soak her feet to find her husband drinking coffee in the kitchen or sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing clapping games with David. Watching from the doorway, you might think Luis Baruch a present and devoted father. He can make like a dog and woof, do a monkey walk, throw the boy in the air and catch him, and he sometimes comes bearing gifts—a shell necklace for Rebecca, a tin spinning top for the boy, spices for Sultana (though Rebecca suspects that Palomba is behind the offerings and that they’re from the local marketplace). It is hard not to appreciate how the baby perks up at the sight of his father, despite being shy in general and not (with the exception of his uncle Josef, who is still a boy and plays with him) a fan of men.
Come to my sister’s, Luis whispers to Rebecca before long. She’s leaving us the apartment for a couple of hours, your mother can watch the baby. I’m not feeling well, maybe tomorrow, she’ll say, and then tomorrow arrives—he sleeps at his sister’s as if still a bachelor—and he asks again, but no, Luis, sorry, not today, I’m under the weather, David, too, I think we’re getting a cold, I better stay with him. Until what can she do, he nibbles her neck, wears her down. It is her wifely duty to go to bed with him, but also she is lonely, and there is something about Luis—how openly he wants her, maybe. How blue his eyes are, and how guileless, the eyes of a child. How sweet he is, essentially, or is it plain daftness? She hears her father whisper that he is vaziyo, empty-headed, not all there. What is your plan, she asks Luis. You need to focus on one thing! He chews his lower lip. Rebecca imagines slapping him, first one cheek, then the other, until her own palms sting, but at the same time, she feels sorry for him. He seems as uncertain how he married her as she is how she married him, and it’s not his fault that he was damaged by the war.
In the dark with the shutters closed, Luis’s skin is salty, complex, fully human. All he has to do is rub against her at a certain angle and she’ll climax, though she has no name for what is happening, just the feeling of something lengthening, traveling up her spinal column, of her forehead tightening, a pinpricked dazzling—it might be a headache or a fever’s grip. And he is bucking, moaning, emptied out, and they lie there spent, not touching, terrible strangers as her anger and loneliness return and gather force, surprising even her and making her feel, long before her time, that she is old.
“No more, Luis,” she tells him after one such encounter, turning her back on him and reaching for her clothes. “You’ll get me pregnant with another baby to raise by myself.”
“A baby!” Luis says happily.
She starts to get up to make ginger tea—it’s supposed to help stop a pregnancy from taking hold—but he grabs her by the waist and pulls her down.
“I’m starting a lace business,” he says. It is something she’d suggested the week before, after noticing a shortage of decent quality, reasonably priced lace at the market. “As soon as it gets going good, I’ll send for you.”
“Send for me where?”
He shrugs. “Where it is.”
“Where is that, Luis? Where will it be?”
“Uh, Adrianople? Or Morocco? I’m figuring it out. Someplace good for lace.”
“Why not here? Our son needs his grandmother, I need my mother. It’s a port. I could sell your lace to my clients. We have a base here already, with my brothers’ textiles and my business.”
“All right,” he says agreeably, nuzzling her arm.
“Where will you get it from?”
“What?”
“The lace, for your business—will you import it from somewhere or manufacture it?”
“Yes,” he says.
She twists away, grabs his face in her hands and makes him look her in the eye. “Which?”
“Ow,” he protests. “You’re hurting me!” but she has released him from her grip and is gone, on her way to the kitchen to peel and cut ginger for her tea. As the water heats, she takes a pinch of shredded spice from the cutting board and swallows it raw and pungent, a root to stop a root. For days, her fingertips will smell of ginger and bring hot tears to her eyes. In another life, she would have loved a second child, but she is filled with terror at the thought and has begun to scrutinize David and compare him to the babies she sees on the street, afraid he has inherited deficits from his blockhead father, though her mother, experienced in such matters, says not to worry, he’s developing on course.
It’s a heartache, really, to peek inside Luis’s little mind.
* * *
LUIS IS NOT THERE the day their second son, Alberto, is born sixteen months after David’s birth, though he returns a few months later, staying just long enough for another picnic Palomba arranges in the park. A friend of Palomba’s husband takes their photograph. Later, Rebecca will be struck by the lie of it, for in the picture she looks happy, settled, surrounded by a clan of friends and family: her brothers, a few friends from the congregation, Sultana, Elsa, Palomba with her guitar, even her father, Alberto Grande, as they have taken to calling him (they call the new baby Berto), who almost never ventures out anymore. A month prior, someone threw bloody bones—from what animal was unclear, though it was probably a pig—over the wall into the garden at Provença, so Alberto sent his sons to the animal market to buy two puppies to raise into guard dogs, though in the photograph, the pups look like pets intended for the children, loose-jointed and floppy, full of play.
Luis, kneeling next to David with a puppy, appears sturdier and older than before, a man of the world, though in fact he is in ill health and belching, gaseous and restless throughout the picnic lunch. Next to him, in Rebecca’s arms, is baby Alberto, but while Luis still has a fondness for David, he gets irritated when Rebecca nurses Berto and shows more interest in the puppies than in his second son. That visit, Rebecca does not ask Luis for money, nor does she lobby him to stay. Go sleep at your sister’s, she tells him sharply the evening after the picnic, when they’re back at Provença. He has finished drinking coffee with her parents—her father started grilling him about his business plans but soon gave up—and come into Rebecca’s room, where she’s been lying beside David on the bed, trying not to listen through the door. Both boys are sound asleep, but as Luis approaches, Rebecca starts rocking Berto’s cradle with an outstretched arm. Luis lies down next to her and tries to kiss her. She pecks him on the forehead, turns away.
“You’ll wake the boys,” she whispers. “They’re barely sleeping.”
He goes for under her skirt.
“Listen, Luis.” Rebecca slides away and sits up, keeps her voice soft but grave. “I have something to tell you. Please concentrate, all right? I have … it’s a kind of female ailment, I’ve just been to the doctor. Apparently it’s from too much feeding of the babies. But the thing is, Luis, it can give you”—she leans closer—“warts on your pipi.”
“Warts?” He clamps a hand over his crotch.
She nods gravely. “Yes, and then, well, they told me it can sometimes atrophy.”
“Ke?”
Again she nods. She has his complete attention now and feels, in equal measure, a sense of triumph and of sorrow—that he is so easy to trick, that it has come to this. “Your thingee becomes useless,” she adds. “No good, like dead wood. Kaput.”
“Aye! I’ve never heard of this!”
She sniffs. “It’s not uncommon, but they just figured out the cause. It’s a dreadful malady.”
In truth, the nurse she saw after Berto’s birth told her to stay away from Luis because he docked in many ports. Those were her words: A traveling man like your husband docks in many ports. If Rebecca had felt more than a flutter of jealousy at the idea of it, something might have been salvaged, but she felt nothing except surprise at the idea of Luis possibly having the wherewithal to take up with other women, along with a powerful desire to avoid contagion or another pregnancy.
* * *
LUIS GETS UP, goes to his sister’s. The next day he leaves town without saying goodbye. For herself, Rebecca feels mostly embarrassment; she does not want to be the object of pity, the abandoned wife. But what about David, already smitten with his father, and Berto, too young to know him? This, she cannot forgive. In the months to follow, Palomba will bring small presents for the children or stop by, wanting to take David out for ice cream or leave some cash. My brother will come back, she says. Or he’ll send for you, I made him promise. In the meantime, though, take a little something. It’s not much, Rebecca, but it can help with the children. Please.
Thank you but no thank you. Give it to the temple if you want, but not to me.
An aunt is not a father. Rebecca’s dressmaking business is growing. Her old determination has been strengthened to almost bullish proportions by the birth of her children and the pathetic behavior of their so-called father. So she is proud. Is it a sin? The nuns thought so, but her own people have the story of the rabbi who said to keep two truths, one in each pocket, and take them out as needed, or together:
It was for me the world was created.
I am but ashes and dust.
Thank you but no thank you. We are fine.
* * *
BORN TO SILKS AND LACES, Rebecca sews now for the Spanish upper class and a few well-heeled members of Barcelona’s small Jewish community. Men’s underwear, ladies’ dresses, evening gowns, christening gowns. Elsa, who started out as a clerk at a paste jewelry store, finds a job at a higher-end boutique using her many languages.
At night Rebecca sleeps with her sons, one on each side and both still night-nursing, but she does not mind, finds comfort, even a dim erotic tingle, in their four hands patting, coaxing down her milk, while outside the guard dogs sniff and bay. At the end of each week, she passes over half her earnings to Sultana and keeps half for herself, spending a little on life’s small pleasures—a lipstick or stockings, a toy boat for David and rattle for Berto—and saving the rest to put toward setting up an atelier of her own. At work she collects empty spools of thread for the boys to stack and, when she can steal a few minutes, stitches simple hand puppets—lion, mouse, sailor—from fabric scraps. From worsted wool left over from a high-end suit, she makes her sons Shabbat trousers in English schoolboy style. At home in the garden, if David, learning to walk, staggers into a flower bed or beheads a bloom, he might get a weak thwack on the bottom from his grandfather, who is truly an old man now, with an old man’s sudden flares and dozy dreams. And then Avuela coming fast, to rescue them both: Ven, mi chiko, deshalo en paz! Come, my child, leave him in peace!
The letter, which arrives on a Monday in December 1928, is brief and to the point—“I’m feeling better, come to Adrianople, bring the children”—and in Luis’s own hand, the b’s and d’s reversed. Rebecca reads it, folds it up, returns the page to its envelope. Later, after the boys are asleep, she takes it out again. Every boy should have a father, and it is a daily humiliation to be raising two children on your own when you’re not even a widow, and she feels, beneath the polished face she offers to the world, like damaged goods. At the same time, it seems utterly foolish to set off to an unknown, faraway city to find Luis, a man she doesn’t love, much less respect. Could he have changed?
But also this: At the end of the letter, below his initials, he has drawn a man, just a simple stick figure but with one leg kicked up in a jaunty stance, and next to it, a little heart, and finally, it is the drawing—the extra effort of it, the figure’s simple, rakish charm, the heart—that reels her in.
Not that she has much choice. He is her husband. “You married before God,” her father says sadly when Rebecca shows him the letter, and her mother, standing behind him as he sits at the kitchen table, hands on his shoulders, does not disagree.
“What if I just threw away the letter?” Rebecca asks. “No one has to know.”
Her mother shakes her head. “Maybe he’s better. Maybe they cured him over there. Everyone deserves a second chance, and you deserve a husband. You can always come back or leave the babies here with us until you’re sure he’s for real.”
“No! They’re my children!” Rebecca gets up from the table, fighting back a childlike desire to pound her fists and stomp her feet. “I’m their mother. I’m not leaving them behind.”
Her mother nods, looking almost victorious. “It will do them good to spend this time with you. May God be with you on your journey. Just in case, I’ll sew the return fare into your clothes.”
Adrianople, 1929
THE NEW YEAR ARRIVES. A few days later, Rebecca fills a suitcase, and her parents bring her and her two sons to the boat. Berto is plump and snuggly in her arms, but David is already walking, running, eyes on the nearest exit. For the voyage, she sews him a harness and leash. They go to France first, to Marseille, and from Marseille on another boat to Turkey. They arrive in Istanbul in the afternoon, having wired ahead. Her father’s brother, Maurice, meets them at the port, takes them to his elegant house on a hill and invites them to spend the night and leave for Adrianople the next morning, but Rebecca declines: “Thank you, but my husband is expecting us.” In truth, the idea of being home but not home is just too upsetting, and her ancient grandmother, who lives with Tiyo Maurice, has grown senile and does not recognize her, instead spitting in her direction, and it’s only a matter of time before David breaks a piece of china or rams into a wall.
I am going to my husband. The relatives gather, all from her father’s side (her maternal grandmother is in poor health and cannot come). Apple tea, biscochos and baklava are served. Rebecca, who eats like a sow when she is nursing, gobbles down two, four, six sweets before, in danger of popping the buttons on her already-tight dress, she sits on her own sticky hands. There is nothing she hates more than pity, and she feels it in their careful tone and skittish gazes. How are your parents? Fine. Your father’s job? It suits him, he has time to read. I like your hair, says her cousin Zimbul (Rebecca has cut it short and blocky like a picture in one of her pattern magazines, a grim but temporary mistake); is that a Spanish style? I hate to leave, but we should go to the train station, says Rebecca finally. Stay, implores Maurice’s wife, Grasya. Just for the night, to get rested, and for the children—they need a good night’s sleep, and you look … drawn. We’re fine, Tiya.
Rebecca’s impatience shows in her voice. Sitting with a tulip glass of apple tea on a wide, low bench in the salon with high windows and antique kilim rugs and embossed leather books as Berto sleeps in her arms and David plays in a nearby room with Zimbul’s son under a nanny’s watchful eye, she feels acutely aware of this being a world no longer hers. Her father was never close to Maurice, who is at least a decade younger. There were … what?… dealings, grudges, maybe. Shared properties. Squabbles about money. Who knows? Probably her father squandered it. There was something—a scrap of memory returns to her, a conversation overheard—about a rooming house and prostitutes, a shameful business deal gone bad. What’s done is done; it hardly matters anymore. What is harder to ignore is the fact that Maurice has stayed here and appears to be doing just fine, which calls into question Rebecca’s father’s story that they had to leave because there’s nothing left for the Jews in Turkey. That they are refugees. Maurice has no sons, only daughters, and need not worry about mandatory military conscription, so maybe that’s the difference, and he only goes to services for major holidays, so maybe that’s it—he can blend in. But perhaps he just managed things better, thought ahead, drank and gambled less, worked harder, constructing and preserving a life for himself and his family. (Rebecca will do the same, she vows, despite being a woman and headed into the wilderness.)
She takes her boys into a small salon to change their clothes and diapers, nurses Berto, having resolved to wean David, who does not protest, and rejoins the family to eat a light supper and accept the picnic basket Grasya has prepared. Overcome with an acute desire to be recognized, she kisses her grandmother goodbye, and this time Nona treats her tenderly, cupping her face between her hands. Kaminos de leche i miel, says Grasya, and the others echo her: paths of milk and honey. Maurice tries to give Rebecca cash for the journey, in case something happens; Rebecca says thank you but no thank you, we are fine (is it the only word she knows?). It is getting dark by the time Maurice takes them to the station, where Rebecca buys her ticket and sends a telegram to Luis as Berto whimpers in her arms and David tugs on his leash while people stare.
