The World Between, page 3
The Georgian woman is proud of her teeth. She bares them constantly. From her pocket comes a key that opens the door to the small balcony in my room. Tomasz must have awakened from his nap, because just as spring washes in, so does Chopin’s nocturne. I can smell the chlorophyll rising off the grass and the rain coming in from the north. Remember after we were married how we stood on the balcony during the first rain of the season? Our neighbors screaming at us to get inside, calling us mishegeneh. The rain lashing. The sky above a fearsome gray. Our clothes plastered to our skin and we kissing, kissing. God, I loved it when we kissed. I loved your face, your dark blue eyes, the clean ascetic cheeks, the long nose and square chin. I loved how your blond hair bordered on brown and how it curled after we made love.
In this country, rain smells like freedom, you shouted at the sky just as a flash of lightning burst across a cloud.
There are no chairs on the balcony, so the Georgian woman and I lean against the iron railing like those women in Italian movies, greeting the American soldiers who’ve come to liberate them. The orderly chatters on in Gruzinic. She doesn’t mind that I don’t understand a word and points to two stray dogs near the rosemary bushes and gives me a salacious wink. It’s not the first time I’ve seen dogs shtupping. In the camp, the guards caught a pair in a shed and shot them. The more jovial guard said they should’ve let them finish before slaughtering them, but the other, more pragmatic one said there was no better time to die, so they’d done them a service. Rothman and I were there when the guards dropped the dogs onto the grass. Their teeth bared, bodies attached mid-coitus, a pair of spooning lovers: the male big spoon, the female little spoon. The guards eviscerated them and said if we cleaned up the mess, they’d give us a serving of stew. Rothman and I buried it all, not a trace left. I was always so hungry, I thought I could eat anything, but it turned out I couldn’t. Rothman ate my portion. He gave me his bread.
With the Georgian woman I get to use my miming skills and indicate that we ought to give the dogs their privacy, but she laughs and calls me something in Gruzinic, which I take to mean prudish. We return our attention to the dogs’ performance. I admire the female dog. She remains stoic amid all that vigorous humping. Later the Georgian woman tugs at my sleeve and we go inside. She removes her kerchief in a gesture of commiseration and rubs my head.
Maybe Rothman has already told you. They cut my hair, Max. The nuns. Three of them came into my room. I should’ve known something was up when they locked the door behind them. Did you know they wear gold wedding bands and believe they’re married to Jesus? And there’s no divorce. Not for them. Sister Francoise is an impressive woman at all times. She’s six feet and one inch tall. I know because I looked up her medical record in the file cabinet behind Dr. S’s desk when he had to step out during one of our sessions. She towers over us all.
I’m sorry, my dear, Sister Francoise said, but we think vanity may be interfering with your recovery. You should be better by now, more at ease.
I am better, I said. Much better. I wiped the sweat from my palms on my robe and recalled the hydrotherapy session.
I had hoped Dr. S was ready to sign my release form and sent them as emissaries of liberation. Then I saw the shears and understood the Sisters weren’t there to free me but were delivering a lesson in humility.
Please, I begged, and promised that from now on I’d wear my hair braided, or cover my head altogether, like my mother before the war when we were pious and didn’t mix the milkhik with the fleishik. They waited for me to plait my hair. My hands shook, so it took some time. What patience these nuns have!
It’s true, I said, I take pleasure in brushing my hair. No, pleasure is the wrong word. Comfort. I take comfort and comfort isn’t vanity, is it? I mean, even when I stand in front of a mirror, I hardly look at myself. Who’d want to see this? I said, drawing an imaginary circle around my face like some amateur comedian at Grossinger’s angling for a laugh. I got nothing, not a chuckle, not a smile, not even a quivering lip.
Sister Francoise bowed her head. I think she said a prayer in Latin or maybe it was French, then snapped the scissors open and shut like a pair of canine jaws. She pressed the cold blade against my neck and just like that it was done. What had taken years of tending, coloring, straightening, the chemical relaxers doing their best to iron out the Yiddish kink, the weekly shampoo at the salon on 75th, roasting under the dryers, listening to the blue-haired ladies yelling about whose bris they’d attended and what fish was served, disappeared in seconds.
Dr. S was furious with them. But what could he do?
Don’t worry, it’ll grow back, he patted the inch or so of hair the good Sisters left on my head.
Now whenever my reflection catches in the window, I think, I know her, I’ve seen her before.
13.
The first time I saw the Georgian woman, I was sure that I recognized her; she looked so familiar. I woke in a strange room. The window was shuttered. I made my way to the door in the dark, but it was locked. There was a cot in the corner. I rested there, waiting for someone to release me. I smelled smoke and the sound of fabric burning filled my head and then the Georgian woman entered. Her hair was braided in a crown, and when she opened her mouth to speak, the light caught on her gold teeth. Her hands jerked agitatedly over her uniform before she stuffed them into her pockets.
“Do I know you?” I said, but she was already moving down the hall. I felt I’d been locked in that room for days, maybe weeks. I was thirsty and had to relieve myself but there was no toilet, only a chamber pot under the cot that I couldn’t bring myself to use. And then I remembered where I’d seen the Georgian woman before or someone like her, because even in my befuddled state I knew she couldn’t be the matron from the children’s home in Kolyma who also wore her hair in a braided crown. Each week I stood in line with the other children stripped down to our underwear, shivering, waiting for her to shave our heads to rid us of the lice that feasted on us while the snow and wind smacked against the orphanage walls.
We called her the Queen of Razor Blades. She scraped our scalps with a straight razor, nicking the sores left from last week’s sweep. I always tried to be first in line when the razor was sharpest. Cuts were deeper when it wasn’t. Rothman taught me that. And because I raced to the front of the line and didn’t hang back like the others, the matron thought I was a good and eager comrade and made me responsible for the orphaned toddlers. I had to make sure they were washed and fed and didn’t get underfoot. For this I received an extra ration of bread a week.
The matrons were a surly lot, each with a switch in their hands, and if they couldn’t find a branch, a shoe did just as well, a belt if they had one. I didn’t hold the children. I didn’t sing to them or play with them. I was eight at the start of the war. I barely spoke to anyone, except for Rothman and my mother. My mother visited the Children’s Home for a few hours on Sunday afternoons. It was her only time off from her duties as a laundress. I chattered like a small bird as she fed me a potato, sometimes a beet. Those first months I learned all the children’s names: Roza, Micha, Tzila, Shmulik, Wolfe, Basya, Shlomo, Baruch, but after that winter when so many died of pneumonia, I stopped. The last winter in the camp I didn’t even bother numbering them. I made sure they were fed and washed, but no more than that. Five years of war had turned us all into wolves. And the leader of the wolves was Rothman. He taught me to survive, to steal, to lie. Like him, I’d have done anything for a bowl of barley soup and a heel of bread.
When I am alone in my room, I search for the treats the Georgian woman leaves behind: cigarettes, a matchbook, a fifth of Smirnoff, a bar of Elite chocolate. She finds the cash Rothman gives me, smuggled in my shoe, and takes more than we agreed on. It’s worth it. I smoke a cigarette in my bathroom, sip the vodka, and feel the heat travel the length of my throat and wash up in my belly. I smoke half a cigarette and save the rest for later. All of this gives me a sense of déjà vu.
14.
A conversation with Dr. S the same week the nuns cut my hair:
Tell me what the New York critics said about your Yiddish Jocasta, he says while trying not to stare at my sorry head.
How did you hear about that? May I? I point to the cigarette box on his desk. It’s something a child has made with tongue depressors and glue. A grandchild, perhaps?
He nods. I looked you up, he says, and strikes a match.
I’m flattered, I say, puffing on the cigarette.
Jocasta, he urges.
An excellent part for a woman my age. I take a deep drag and blow a train of smoke above my head.
And? he says.
You know the story. What she does to her child.
Remind me?
Tomasz is in fine form. The strains of the nocturne burble under Dr. S’s door. I wonder if our resident pianist is wearing his brown-and-white-striped pajamas today.
Well? he says.
In her attempt to save her son, she destroys him, I say.
And?
Everything else follows.
15.
You placed an ad in the Jewish Press a few weeks before I left New York, and put it on your desk for me to find. I know things were bad between us, but how could you do it, Max? Nischt eyns vort. Not one word about it. The advertisement as blunt as a brick: Apartment for sale. The Street of Shoes, Number 9, Apartment 6, Tel Aviv, Israel.
What were you thinking? What would selling our home in Tel Aviv accomplish? You don’t need the money so why would you get rid of the one place we were truly happy?
Rothman told me you asked for his help.
Nischt eyns vort. Not one word from you to mark this betrayal.
16.
In the dream I am in an interrogation room at a police station near the Twin Towers. The detective is a woman I’ve never met. She switches on a reel-to-reel tape player that sounds like ribbons tied to the spokes of a child’s bicycle and states for the record that it’s 3:47 a.m. Her hair is blue and sits on her head like a helmet. An officer in full regalia guards the door. Rothman is beside me in a pinstriped suit, acting as my attorney. He wears his expensive gold watch and checks it every few minutes. Wife number three is young and restless, waiting for him at home. He is anxious to get to her. She sleeps with a packed suitcase under the bed. It rests there like a warning, a signal that she could leave him at a moment’s notice. What reason does she give, I ask Rothman. He counts off, one, disappointment; two, unhappiness; three, boredom. And for this he almost loves her, for this and the daughter she’s given him, like a gift, a most perfect gift.
The interrogation begins and the three speak in a language I don’t understand, and though you aren’t in the room, I hear you say to me that it’s Aramaic.
How do you know?
My father taught me.
But that language is dead.
Like us, you said.
Rothman turns to me and smiles. The right half of his mouth is crowned in gold, but it’s the left side, where the teeth are shattered, and the jaw has caved in that I cannot stop looking at.
17.
I miss reading the newspaper. Rothman isn’t any good at giving me the day’s news. To him, everything is fleeting and so why bother dwelling on events that will change nothing or everything. The only things worth knowing are those that affect his livelihood. Do you remember the biblical scholar who lived next door? For an entire year before he and his wife abandoned New York for Jerusalem, he stole our newspaper every morning. In the afternoon on my way to the theater, I’d run into him in the elevator. He was always garbed in a worsted suit, shoes shined. The mamzer had the nerve to tip his hat and say, How are you today? I’d reply, Well, and you, and ask after his wife. We’d go on this way politely, a smugness playing around his mouth, a fury in my chest, choking me as I thought of him reading our paper over his breakfast, while you or I had to run down to Stein’s to purchase a new one, convinced that our newspaper, the one we had ordered, never arrived. You didn’t believe it was him, someone so erudite, a yekke like you, until the morning I woke you at 5:30 a.m. and we waited by the peephole and watched him tiptoe to our door dressed in a burgundy velour robe and slippers that I’d seen on sale at Bonwit Teller. I was dismayed when you shrugged your shoulders and went back to bed and knew that you wouldn’t confront him or demand that he pay for the papers he’d pilfered from us.
One evening while you were teaching your course on Yiddish writers at Stern College, his door was ajar and I looked in and saw him sitting in the living room, enjoying the radio and reading our Yiddish paper, Forverts. That fury in my chest returned with such force that I ran back to our apartment and grabbed the first sharp instrument I could find; it happened to be an ice pick. I saw his Volvo parked in its usual spot in the garage, and I punctured all four of his tires. I’d never done anything like that before. It was exhilarating. Rothman would have approved. He thrives on vengeance. You would have been horrified. It was so much easier than I’d imagined. I left the ice pick on his welcome mat. After that, no matter what time we rose, our paper was there, neatly folded on the doorstep, and he tipped his hat, the smugness gone from his face, only a fearful awareness remained that I was a stranger to him, a danger he hadn’t counted on.
18.
In my dream, Rothman asks me how I hurt my hands. Hurt? I repeat and look to see that both are wrapped in bandages. I unwind a mile of gauze, and the closer I get to the skin, the more my hands burn. A blister sits in the center of each palm the size of a snow globe, and inside the dome of my right hand is a miniature version of me, and inside the dome of my left hand is a miniature version of you. We are swimming back and forth from one end to the other, unable to stop, doomed to perform this act for eternity.
You smell of smoke, Rothman says.
He’s right, my clothes stink. There’s soot under my fingernails and nothing to relieve the pain in my hands.
“Can you tell us what led to the events at Number 9, the Street of Shoes?” the detective asks. The tape continues to churn.
19.
Crows swoop in and out of the Aleppo pines that border the garden. Dr. S pours tea into porcelain china cups. My mother had a similar set when we lived in Krosniewice before the war. The rims were decorated in gold with a chain of yellow primroses beneath. Every afternoon she’d brew a pot of Darjeeling a relative from England sent us for Rosh Hashanah. She would place a cube of sugar in the center of the cup, then pour the tea over it. After the sugar dissolved and the tea was stirred, she would float a paper-thin slice of lemon on the surface, so thin it was almost transparent. I was fascinated by the graceful movement of her hands during what became a kind of ceremonial ritual we shared, the way she lifted the sugar tongs, then submerged her spoon into the brew and rotated it counterclockwise without ever scraping the sides of the cup. No one had more elegant hands than my mother. She took great care of them. On Thursday evenings when my father worked late at his butcher shop, we’d listen to a concert on the radio and she’d dip her hands into a pot of melted paraffin wax, then hold them in the air while I wrapped them in warm towels. I loved cracking open the hardened wax casing, revealing the soft pink and white flesh beneath. The impression of her lifeline and whorls on her fingertips embedded in the wax were like a map of a secret city. All my life I tried to decipher the mystery that was my mother. She smelled of roses and old books, silver polish, and yeast. I didn’t know much about her past. In my childish mind she was born the moment I was. We’d sip our tea, sometimes blowing gently to cool it. She’d ask about my school day and I’d recount in detail what I had learned, still wearing the red plaid uniform with the gold crest on the pocket. Even then I was good at recitation and the teacher would commend me in front of the class. I loved the world of words, the feel of them gliding off my tongue and how my voice would make them ring and tremble. My performance made even the children who knocked me down and spat the word zhyd, Jew, in the schoolyard sit up in their chairs. At the end, everyone clapped. For those few minutes, I was beloved. I was one of them. That same sense of belonging envelops me every time an audience applauds.
After our tea, Mama and I would walk along the lakeshore. She’d point out the blue heron hidden in the reeds. I imagined climbing onto its back and taking flight, its neck stretching, its wings expanding wide, flying high above our town, over the main square where farmers sold their produce on market days. The church and its towering cross puncturing the sky and the Jewish quarter with our modest synagogue, not far from my father’s butcher shop. Beyond was the forest where we were told never to go. Not a good place for Jews—too dark, too many trees, too many acres into which we could disappear.
In winter, Mama and I would bundle up and skate on the lake, sometimes Papa closed his shop early and joined us, and if the sun shone, we’d see heaven reflected in the ice. When Rothman and Tomasz were there, Mama would stand on the bank watching the three of us glide across the clouds, her elegant hands buried in a fox fur muff. She sold the muff for bread and potatoes in one of the towns we stopped in during the long journey to Siberia. By then Krosniewice was overtaken by the German army and a ghetto was created for the Jewish families that remained.
What brought you to Israel? Dr. S asks.
The weather, I say. New York can be brutal in winter.
20.
The next day Dr. S continues with the same line of questioning.
Tell me what you hoped to find here? he says.
In the hospice?
Israel.
