Kantika, page 12
We arrive tomorrow around 4 in the morning STOP Please meet us at the train STOP Your loving wife Rebecca STOP
* * *
THEY ARRIVE IN ADRIANOPLE to a dark and wintry world, the ground dusted with snow. For the last hour, the train was nearly empty, just the three of them and a well-dressed older Turkish couple in their car. The motion had been soothing; after a round of polite conversation across several languages, they’d all slept. When Rebecca disembarks with her sons, the Turkish couple gets off, too, the man helping with her valise and the woman assisting with David, who is still half-asleep and stumbles along drunkenly until the lady scoops him up. They enter the station to find the place empty, the ticket window shuttered.
Rebecca looks around, searching her mind for Turkish words, which have receded during her years in Spain. “My husband”—her voice echoes in the large space—“is late.”
“We’ll wait with you. We’re not leaving you here alone.”
The woman sets David on the bench and sits down beside him; her husband adds Rebecca’s valise to their own pile, which makes her suddenly, unaccountably sad. Inside it, a photograph of her parents and, distributed among the hems of several dresses, enough money for the return trip.
The station has a ceiling and three walls, with its fourth side open to the outside. In the cavernous, cold space, they wait for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half. The man builds a fire in the stove in the corner, and Rebecca sits near it, rocking Berto. His wife takes off her coat to wrap David, who is shivering, and the man disappears and returns with hot tea, having found an open stand, and together, they finish off the bread, cheese, dried apricots and olives from Grasya’s picnic basket.
“Thank you.” Rebecca speaks to the couple in broken Turkish mixed with French, as they know a little bit. “Thank you very much, but you can leave now. It’s getting light. My husband will be here soon.”
“Maybe he didn’t get your telegram, chérie,” the Turkish lady says. “Or he had trouble with his carriage in the snow. You said he lives in the mountains? What is the town? We’re from around here. Maybe we can tell you where it is.”
Rebecca finds the piece of paper with the address of Luis’s cousin’s house in her purse and hands it to the lady, who gives it to her husband.
“Oh, that’s high up in the countryside.” The man returns the paper to her.
“Is the road twisty?” asks Rebecca, and the man says yes, very, and she fumbles for her bonjuk bead beneath her coat, shuts her eyes and speaks to El Dyo—may Luis not be lying in a ditch by the side of the road; may I open my eyes to see him coming toward me—but when she opens her eyes, it is David she sees, sprawled on the dirty floor like a pauper boy, paddling his arms and legs. Anger rises in her, partly at Luis but more at herself for marrying an overgrown child, and at her parents: You married in the eyes of God; when your husband sends for you, you go. What about your first wife, Papa (she had not said), the one you abandoned, driving her to madness? Did you marry in the eyes of God?
The couple stays; the embers glow. Rebecca collects David from the floor and starts to sing—ah lye leh, ku ba bey—a nonsense song that arrives in her mouth from who knows where, and she rocks her children beneath her shawl and sings some more, durme durme, kerido ijiko, until her voice grows hoarse. Finally, both boys fall asleep at the same time—a small miracle, grasyas Dyo—so she puts them in the makeshift crib the man has improvised from benches and a wall. She returns to sit beside the Turkish woman, then, and a kind of peace descends. They are so small, all of them, and though the station has a roof, she can see the scene as if from above: five figures, three big, two small. They might be made of clay and wire, homemade dolls bent instinctively toward each other and the fire. And finally, her head on the Turkish woman’s shoulder, she sleeps, too.
* * *
IT IS SIX, SIX-THIRTY, not yet light. The ticket window opens and a few people arrive to buy tickets or pick up passengers, but not Luis. There is a driver outside, a man with a carriage waiting for customers, but he says he can’t wait much longer; he has to go somewhere else to look for the next job. You go with him, Rebecca tells the couple, but they say they live near the station; when it’s time for them to go, they’ll walk.
At half past seven, the driver says he has to leave if Rebecca can’t make use of his services, so finally she gets into the carriage, Berto in her arms, David pressed to her side, all of them under fur. She pulls her hand out from beneath the dense pelt to wave goodbye to the Turkish couple, calling grasyas grasyas—it’s not their language but it’s what comes out of her—and as they disappear from view, she has the queasy sense of leaving something good and valuable to go toward something not. Slowly, the sun comes up. They drive past people on the road, in carriages, on foot, carrying water, herding goats. As she sees turbaned men and veiled women like visitors from her childhood, she begins to feel happy, peaceful again (am I freezing to death? she wonders calmly), and David peeks his head out from the fur and looks around, wide-eyed, newly awake and squirming, while Berto sleeps.
They pass a marketplace waking with morning life. They pass a tall yellow synagogue with twin towers and Magen Davids in stained glass, and she feels a flood of desire to live in a place where she doesn’t need to hide her faith, though she hadn’t known she’d minded it so much. As the sun grows stronger, she makes out minarets in the distance and hears the call to prayer coming from several directions at once, and a sound escapes her own lips, a song or moan. She sits up taller, points things out to David, who is alert and curious, and who is, after all, a little Turkish boy, or Turkish Hebrew, as it says on his passport, despite—for reasons Rebecca doesn’t fully understand but that infuriate her father—his having been born (yet never made a citizen. We were promised) in Spain.
Then they are going out through the city gates and up a steep road, snow everywhere, and the bumpy passage of the carriage on the rocky path is soothing, nothing to do except jostle, slide, sway and hold the children tight. David’s eyelids start to flutter and he soon falls back asleep beneath the fur blanket. Chin resting on the top of his hard little head, Rebecca shuts her eyes. A Turkish song returns to her: köpek uçmak istemiş, birgün kargaya gitmiş. The dog wants to fly so he goes to see the crow. The washerwoman used to sing it, back when they had a washerwoman. And another one: dandini dandini dandasta. Finally, her babies damp and heavy against her, she also sleeps.
She wakes to the driver cursing and stabbing his pickax at a trough of frozen water so the horse can drink, and then they set out again, climbing still higher and on narrower roads, and the driver stops several times to ask directions until finally they arrive at Luis’s cousin Oro’s house.
Oro, who comes outside with a blanket over her shoulders, shrieks when she sees them. “You didn’t let us know you were coming! You’re his wife? You’re Rebecca? We didn’t know you were coming! We didn’t know!”
“But I did! I sent a telegram. He gave me your address.”
“We never got a telegram. The weather has been awful, the roads were blocked for weeks, but anyway, we can only get letters up here. It’s too remote. Come in! Your children are cold. You’re all cold, poor things!” And then to the carriage driver, in Turkish, “You, too, mister. I’ll feed you before you turn around, and you can get hay and water for the horse. Everybody, let me shut the door, the heat is escaping. Please come in.”
The house is like a barn, not even a real floor, just dirt, with farm animals living on the lower level and Oro’s two sons, school-aged boys (in time they will grow up to be esteemed rabbis in Israel), doing homework under blankets by the fire. Even in the cold, the stench of hay and manure are strong. Rebecca has never seen a house like this and must suppress the urge to flee, but Oro, who has a pretty, round face and whose name means “gold,” is pulling up a chair and offering fragrant lentil soup and bread, and so all of them eat together by the fire, and then Rebecca pays the carriage man, who wishes her luck and tips his cap before going out to feed his horse and drive away.
“Where is my husband, Oro?” Rebecca asks that night before bed, and again in the morning as she helps Oro fold laundry stiff with cold and drinks tea and nurses Berto and even offers David her breast because he seems so glum, but Luis is not there, and one day, two days, three days pass, though time is a dream here, endless and watery, and she has trouble keeping track. “Where is Luis, where is Mishon? Why doesn’t he come? My sons want to see their father. He told us to come! Is something wrong, Oro? Why did my husband write for us to come?”
“He’s working,” Oro keeps saying. “Somewhere a little far away.”
“Is he a liar, Oro?” Rebecca asks on the fourth morning as she rocks Berto in a rough pine cradle with her foot. “Truth be told, I never quite understood him. Can you help me? Was he always so…” Dim-witted, she might say. Vacant. Tricky, though that might give him too much credit. Dumb. “What was he like when he was young?” she tries instead.
“He was”—Oro looks pained, like she might start to cry—“a nice boy. Sweet. I used to play with him. He didn’t tease me like my other boy cousins. He had a gentle soul. He loved to run.”
“Ha!” says Rebecca so bitterly that David, by her feet on the floor, looks up from the pot he’s pounding with a wooden spoon. “Nothing has changed. Was he slow as a boy? A little feebleminded? Did he have trouble focusing in school?”
“Slow? I don’t think so, but we don’t have much schooling over here except for religious study, which I’m making sure my boys do. Mishon had to start working at the age of nine or ten. Later, I think he got some injuries in the war.”
“Well, they must have left his jewels alone,” Rebecca says crassly. “That man walks into a room and I get pregnant. I’d love another child, a daughter especially, but until he proves he can earn a living and stay by our side, that’s it for me. Where is your own husband, Oro, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Working. There’s not a lot of work up here. You have to go down. He stays with his cousin in the town.”
“Why don’t my in-laws want to come meet us, to see their grandsons, Oro? I thought—”
“They’re coming, Rebecca, just wait a little. Please.” Oro gets up and won’t meet Rebecca’s gaze. “Everyone is busy, that’s all.”
* * *
THEN ONE MORNING, Rebecca looks out the window and sees the rabbi coming up the steep road to the house. She sees women approaching, all in black, like crows climbing up the hill.
“Oro!” she says. “Why are all these people coming here? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t worry, Rebecca, they’ll tell you.”
A woman enters the house, sits down next to her, puts a hand on her arm and says, “My sweet girl, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry what happened to you. It happened to me, the exact same thing. I was very young when I lost my husband. Aye, it happened to me, too!”
“What do you mean? What do you mean, that I lost my husband? The way you talk! Don’t talk to me like this!”
“I’m so sorry, my sweet,” says the woman, “but that’s what happened.”
Rebecca’s breakfast rises up, and there’s a floaty feeling, a watercolor bleeding so soft as to be almost pleasant, followed by a hailstorm battering her eyelids, and her vision swims. Later, the rabbi will tell her that she fainted and fell off the chair, and that she’s lucky because the dirt floor saved her head.
* * *
AFTER A TIME, THEY bring something to revive her, salts to wake her up, and Oro confesses that Luis fell very ill after he returned home, and then he, well, he just … may his memory be a blessing, but he died. He’s been buried already; he is gone, in the ground. “I’m so sorry,” Oro stumbles. “I didn’t know how to tell you, what to do, you came from so far, your boys are so small…” Apparently, Luis’s father had written to Palomba with the news, asking her not to send Rebecca to Turkey, and if she’d already left to tell her to turn back, but it was too late. She was on the high seas by then. It was too late for them to find her. She was gone.
When she gets over the initial shock, her first thought is how to return to Spain to her family, but the roads to Adrianople are impassable—an ice storm has come, it’s winter still, time passing so slowly that days feel like weeks feel like months. Anyway, Luis’s family has other plans. Now that Rebecca knows the dismal truth, his parents are at Oro’s house all the time, country people with broad accents who stink of garlic, and though she shrinks from them, she can’t help also feeling a little pity for his mother, Bohosa, who has lost her eldest son and moves like a sleepwalker, racked with grief. Stay for a few months, let us get to know our grandsons, his mother keeps saying, forever pulling the boys into her arms, and as if she has cast a spell, Berto starts smiling at her and then David develops a bad cough. You can’t travel with him sick like that, begins the chorus. It’s still winter and so cold! Stay a little (bearing broth and rue, poultices and potions, wooden farm animals carved for the boys by Luis’s father, who turns out to have a hidden talent). Your sons are the spitting image of Luis, everyone keeps saying, especially of David, even as Rebecca tries to wipe Luis’s face from her mind.
Later, it will all feel like a terrible dream: David getting better but passing the cough on to Rebecca, who hacks until her ribs ache; the rabbi reappearing on a Friday to circumcise Berto, which they hadn’t had a way to do in Spain; four men, including Oro’s husband, who is back now, dour and large, holding down a thrashing, screaming Berto (in Spain, for David, a mohel had been passing through, and Rebecca’s father had held the baby, who’d remained wide-eyed and calm until after the cut); Rebecca lunging for Berto as Oro and Luis’s mother keep her back. Between coughing fits, she screams bloody murder, having become some other, nightmarish version of herself, a vulgar woman with no manners, a rabid animal, as the rabbi drones on about how beautiful the baby is, so blond, so fat.
“Ojo malo,” she calls out in front of everyone. “Keep your hands off my baby! He never screams like this! A curse on all of you! You’re hurting him! Give him back to me!”
Then Berto is in her arms, his cheek smeared with his own blood from the crude cut on his tiny penis, and she is murmuring into her son’s flushed, bewildered face and grabbing David by the hand and stumbling outside into the cold air, where she sits on the edge of a stone wall and unbuttons her dress, murmuring I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, my darlings—I’ll get us out of here, I’ll take you home, I’ll get us out, as she puts her wailing baby to her breast.
Eventually, Berto’s wound heals, and in late February, he has his first birthday. Rebecca’s cough goes away and the roads start to clear. Spring is coming. The tight-fisted buds bring hope. Oro’s sons give David piggybacks across the rocky fields. Rebecca can finally mail a letter to her parents. Weeks pass, but eventually she receives a letter back from her mother saying come on the next train, the next boat. We miss you and our grandsons! Come home to us, don’t delay. Rebecca says, listen, Oro, thank you for your hospitality, but I’m leaving with my sons, going to my mother and father—we’re going back to Spain. Oro, a lonely woman with no mother or sisters, starts to weep and begs Rebecca to stay. What will I do all day long, says Oro, without your singing and your company, but Rebecca is unable to entirely forgive her for withholding the news that Luis was dead, and although she embraces her and promises to stay in touch, in her heart, she is unmoved.
People come from the temple, a different rabbi this time, younger, handsome, with a thatch of curly hair. Again, some women come with him: Rebecca, stay with us, stay here in this village, don’t leave! Luis’s parents want their grandsons close by but not to live with them, maybe because they’re too poor or have something to hide. The whole time she is staying with Oro, Rebecca never even sees their house.
“If you stay here, sinyora,” the rabbi says, “we’ll take your sons and put them in a nice clean orphanage and give them the best education. Don’t worry, we won’t steal them away. They’re your children, but to help to nourish them, you can get a job in a household with a family of means and see them on the weekends. And in the meantime, we’ll look for a man to marry you.”
“Rabbi,” she says, “with all due respect, please stop. It’s decided already. I’m going back to Spain with my children.”
“Oh no, but you can’t. A young lady alone on a journey that long with two babies, this is very dangerous. You’ll perish along the way!”
“We made it here,” she says, “and we will make it home.”
Barcelona, 1929
A FILMMAKER KNOCKS ON THE DOOR. He has no appointment but luck is on his side because Rebecca—born too friendly, in Alberto’s opinion; she’d chat up a paving stone and is a flirt—answers the door and invites the stranger in. It’s a Sunday in November. Alberto is in the garden doing fall cleanup when he looks up to see his daughter leading a tall man through the apartment and into the garden. The man is filming, so that the first thing Alberto sees, before he glimpses a pasty complexion and sharp eyes behind thick, black-framed glasses, is a movie camera, aimed at him.
“Put that down!” he says reflexively in Ladino, and then, when the man does not, repeats it in Castilian and tacks on “por favor.”
The man lowers the whirring machine, fiddles with a button and shuts it off. “My apologies, señor,” he answers in Castilian. “Of course.” Awkwardly, he extends a hand, elbow still crooked around the camera. Alberto sets down his broom to shake.
