The World Between, page 5
Would you like to give it back to them? she asks.
I am overcome. My face breaks into a smile. Yes, Sister, I would.
She removes a latchkey from a hidden pocket in her habit, pulls back the curtain of ivy to reveal an iron door I hadn’t known was there. A clutch of boys, ages eight to twelve, waits anxiously, shuffling their feet, staring at the ground, sheepish faces red from exertion. It’s obvious this isn’t the first time they’ve lost their ball in the hospice’s garden. They bow when they see Sister Francoise the way my classmates and I bowed in respect to our teachers when they’d entered the classroom. She nods in my direction and I approach the threshold, holding the ball in the palm of my hand. The boys stare at me. I am a curiosity, but none of the fear and distaste that I saw in Rothman’s daughter appear in their faces. They are used to the likes of us, the desolate and disenchanted, refugees of a lost continent.
I smooth my hair, forlorn at its length. It’s still so very short, thanks to Sister Francoise’s shears. I don’t want to tell her that I feel more vain now knowing how miskedik I look than when I had long hair.
Here you go, I say in Hebrew and then in English, giving the ball to a boy whose coal- black waves tumble onto his forehead.
He pushes a hank of hair out of his eyes. Thank you, he says and bows with a quick bob, gripping the ball to his chest.
You’re welcome, young man, I say, and search his face, wondering if I’ll see a resemblance to someone I know.
When Rothman and I were in Krosniewice after the war, I caught glimpses of my mother in the faces of women in the market and on the bus. She was there in the soft curve of another’s cheek, the tilt of a head. And when Rothman and I first arrived in Israel, I saw her strolling down Rothschild Boulevard, pushing a baby carriage. Phantom images of her were everywhere. The shattered fragments of those we know are all around us. I remember after Tomasz was gone, I was distraught and asked my father what happens to us when we die.
For such an important question, we need lots of space and air, he said.
And so, we walked around the lake near where Tomasz had drowned. It was a cold day in early spring. I could hardly feel my feet. My father pulled a reed out of the water and snapped it in two, then showed me its hollow length.
We are all vessels, he said, like this reed. Only we’re filled with light, and when we die, the vessel breaks and our light travels into the universe, where it bursts into a thousand pieces, ascending into the world between heaven and earth, where nothing is ever forgotten.
What happens to them, Papa?
He waved his hands up and down and back and forth, mimicking the movement of the shards of light he said floated in the ether alongside the particles of a million souls, and over time, maybe decades or centuries, they find each other, cling to one another, and create new souls born into new bodies.
Does that mean we’re stars in the sky until we’re born? I asked.
No, stars are stars. We’re the light that can’t be seen. No one is ever truly gone. All of us are part of each other. Now Tomasz will be too, he said.
When I look at this boy, I see a child who was in the labor camp, an orphan whose name I don’t recall, but who had the same gold flecks in his eyes. The matrons had arranged an adoption for him. A middle-aged couple, farmers, I think, picked him up. I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know if he survived the war. All I remember is watching him step into a small van and disappearing. Yet here he was again in this boy from the Collège des Frères—small, agile, and smiling.
All right, boys, back to your game, Sister Francoise says. I’ll see you in class tomorrow morning.
Thank you, Sister, they shout, and dash into the yard, past the burbling fountain to where they’ve left their bats and gloves.
Sister Francoise and I return to the garden, where we sit on a bench in the shade of the banyan tree until it’s time for lunch.
30.
One freezing night in late November, before you moved into the spare room, I found you staring out the dining room window facing West End Avenue. Great sheets of black ice covered the road. A phalanx of cars sped past, honking their horns in celebration of a sporting event, flags snapping on their antennas. We heard the terrible skid and then the crash. There was glass everywhere. A woman stumbled out of a car in the middle of the pileup, bleeding down the side of her face. Where is she? The cry reached us on the fifth floor. We were high enough to see the entirety of the street. The child, maybe four or five, thrown clear out of her mother’s car onto the crumbled fender of another farther ahead, pinned by a jagged piece of metal through her chest. We couldn’t look at each other. Something unspeakable had broken between us.
You howled and the sound cracked us wide open, exposing everything we’d buried and burned along the way.
It’s all right, Max. The girl will be all right, I said, realizing I’d spent years protecting you from such things, protecting you from me, from who I was and didn’t dare become.
You lifted your hands, warding me off as if you suddenly saw me, as if the metaphoric skin that had grown over your eyes had peeled away. Your vision returned.
I know, you shouted, and backed into the wall, slapping your head and face, over and over, beating yourself, trying to dislodge what you’d seen.
Max! I attempted to grab hold of your hands, but you pushed me to the ground, and I lay there stupefied, certain that I had already lived this moment in a dream or a play.
He wasn’t my son, you said. He was never my son.
The air grew thin. I couldn’t take a full breath and looked up at you wide-eyed. What are you talking about?
She looks just like him, like Asher.
Who?
Rothman’s little girl. I saw it the summer they were here.
I shook my head, as if to clear it. That was almost a year ago. Why didn’t you say anything?
You’d have denied it. Your eyes squeezed shut and then you walked away from me.
Max, Max, I called, stricken, but you were already gone, left the apartment without your coat.
That night when you returned half-frozen, white-lipped, your cheeks windburned, you moved your things into the study. Only the scent of you remained in the bed sheets.
Ten days we didn’t speak, sealed within the walls of our prewar apartment. A kind of catatonia set in. I had no cheshek for anything, no desire at all. I called the theater, whispered to the house manager that I was sick, voiceless. I had never missed a performance in my life. But I thought, How could I possibly go onstage when your accusation, for that’s what it was, consumed me?
You left to teach your class. I scoured your room for clues, ideas, anything that would help me understand how you came to such a conclusion when Rothman’s daughter looked nothing like our son. I found nothing. I wrapped myself in your blanket on the sofa, sat in the big leather chair at your desk, and that’s when I saw the advertisement in the Jewish Press for the sale of our apartment in Tel Aviv. I felt a kind of terror and knew that my life, the one you and I took such pains to construct, was in terrible danger. Then as if to prove it, I found two envelopes under the newspaper and tore them open. The first had the seal of the New York State Supreme Court, where you’d petitioned for divorce two months before the accident on West End Avenue. The second, embossed with the seal of the Bais Din, the New York Rabbinate, was more recent. You had applied for a Get, a divorce decree, without telling me.
The night before I left, you came into my bedroom, your face waxy with fright. I hoped that you had come to your senses. I hoped that we could forgive each other. But the only words you said to me were, I dreamed I was the little king.
31.
I ask Sister Francoise if I can visit Tomasz-Henrik. She’s pleased and says that I show true Christian charity. We walk to the far end of the ward to his room and find him in bed, looking out the window at a stretch of sky so blue, my throat aches at the sight of it. He’s tucked beneath the sheets, his arms pale against the bedding. I expected them to be muscular from playing the piano; instead they’re spindly and whittled like branches stripped of their bark. Both wrists are bandaged and two fingers on his right hand are in splints. I imagine he slammed the fallboard on them and wonder at his ingenuity, his use of the piano wire on his wrists, how deep it must have cut. A bruise escapes the bandages and rivers upstream toward his elbow.
Go ahead, Sister Francoise says.
Afraid to startle him, I clear my throat, an innocuous sound to which he reacts with a violent shudder. A blank stare in my direction. His eyes never quite land on my face. To Tomasz-Henrik, I am a mosaic. When he’s pieced me together, recognition lights his eyes. His face splits into a wide grin.
Rivkaleh, he shouts with glee, Rivkah, ketzeleh.
His wounded hands shake as he speaks and then he sobs, a terrible sob that splinters the air. Sister Francoise mumbles something under her breath and hustles me out of the room, forgetting to lock the door behind her. She marches me down the hall, my elbow cupped in her hand. Her couvrechef whips behind us.
Who is Rivkaleh?
His first wife, Sister Francoise says.
Is she alive?
Sister shakes her head. She died in Kutno. Typhus, I think. He was there when they loaded her onto the wagon. Poor woman.
There’s a nurses’ station in the center of the ward.
“May I have a bit of Scotch tape?” I say.
“What for?”
“An aerogram has lost its glue.”
Sister Francoise gives me the roll and reminds me to return it. That afternoon while the Georgian woman retrieves the cash from my shoe, I place three strips of tape, one over the other, on the bolt to keep it from locking. Such a small thing and yet my heart races. I imagine my escape, flying past the nurses’ station, down the corridor, the entrance wide open, the sisters sealed in the chapel during Vespers, begging the Eyn Sof, the eternal one, for mercy. But when darkness falls and all is quiet, I sneak past the sleeping sister on duty and walk the hall like a ghost. I am nothing. I am weightless. I reach the entrance but cannot bring myself to step out. The rush of cars on the road terrifies me. The thought of being swallowed up in the darkness alone haunts me. I am in a panic. My heart pounds so hard, my chest hurts. Instead, I run to Tomasz-Henrik’s door and turn the knob, trembling, happy to find it still unlocked. There’s an almost imperceptible creak when I step inside, to which his sensitive musician’s ear is attuned. His eyes flutter open. Rivkaleh? His voice is full of wonder. He makes room for me on the bed. We hold each other; our breath fills the lonely space between us. I am calm again. The bones of his rib cage insistent against my breasts. In that moment, I am his wife. I am Rivkaleh and it is such a relief to be someone else again. I whisper to him, You are my little king. He hums the nocturne in my ear. We sleep, and when dawn arrives, I slip out of his bed. Tomasz-Henrik watches me go, frowning.
Who are you? he says.
No one, I reply.
32.
The cabdriver pulls up to the curb on the Street of Shoes, across from the old central bus station in Tel Aviv.
You sure this is the address? Number 9? he says in a thick Moroccan accent.
Yes. I sit in the cab wrapped in the evening light, shivering with excitement. The dim glow of the streetlamp spills onto the pavement. The Street of Shoes is shabbier than I remember. Baruch’s shoe Factory on the corner where I once worked is now a restaurant that sells falafel and shawarma. There’s still the outline of a slingback shoe on a faded sign, and the scent of glue is a knot of memory that won’t let go.
Maybe a hotel? I take you. No charge. This place is no good, the driver says.
I open the door and he exhales a swift curse, one of those expressive Arabic curses Rothman and I picked up in our first weeks in the country back in ’48. Koos emak, the driver hisses, then lumbers out of the car. He removes my suitcase from the trunk. The street is littered with the day’s garbage; piles of it slouch against the lampposts. A tall, emaciated man lurches toward Levinsky Park a few blocks away, his shadow stretching long behind him.
The driver shakes his head. The place is full of heroin addicts, he says. One of them could rob you, rape you, or worse. Wouldn’t you rather be in a nice clean hotel?
What’s that? I point to a blue light flashing outside a bungalow a few blocks away.
Probably a Beit zonot, you know, a brothel, he says.
There’s no getting around his grimness.
Geveret, he mutters. This is no place for a lady.
33.
The Georgian woman and I are on the balcony when a swallowtail butterfly rises from the bed of lupines in the garden below and flutters onto the back of my hand. Black with blue panes like bits of stained glass lodged in its wings. We stand in the sunshine, breathing in the perfumed air, listening to the distant call of the muezzin. The cyclamen are in bloom. They cover the eastern perimeter of the garden dappled in shade. A pink-and-white carpet of cyclamen. I shake my hand to free the butterfly, but it clings to my knuckle, like a lover, a nettle. The Georgian woman rustles with excitement and points at the sky. She takes a pen and small notepad from her pocket and draws an angel.
Malach, angel, for you, for you he comes, she says in her faltering Hebrew.
34.
Two years before I met you, Rothman and I moved into the apartment on the Street of Shoes. Even in ’49, when the country was barely older than a newborn, the central bus station thrummed with energy. From a small tool shop nearby, the music of Laila Mourad, the Egyptian actress and singer who began her life as a Jew and converted to Islam so she could remain a film star, swelled through the neighborhood. The smell of leather and glue drifted up from Baruch’s shoe factory, where I worked with a dozen girls like me. All of us from somewhere else, listening to Laila Mourad, a woman forced to prove she was no longer a Jew again and again. Like her, we wore the mask of belonging until we fit into it.
One morning I was on the balcony, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper Davar for Hebrew beginners, when a car horn blared. I heard my name shouted above the din. It was Rothman.
Come on, he said.
I leaned over the railing, my heart in my mouth. Where to?
He’d been gone twenty-six days. It was the longest we’d ever been apart since the war, since Siberia.
Beit HaHayal, he said.
And why would I want to go to a veterans’ facility? I said, trying and failing to curb my petulance, my anger, my pleasure. Around Rothman, I was always trying to contain myself.
To keep me company. I’ve got a delivery.
Give me a minute, I said, and rushed inside to dress.
Rothman was twenty-two, still a soldier in the army. I was eighteen. We lived together like brother and sister. A year later, he’d introduce us, Max. He’d say to me, I’ve met your perfect someone. Rothman deeded the apartment to us as a wedding gift. He said he owed me his life when, in fact, I owed him mine. It was a gift I didn’t want, an apartment saturated with his presence. Every room was Rothman, but you agreed to take it. That was our first mistake. We should have bounded for Jerusalem, or Beersheba, or left the country. We should have run somewhere far from him.
He drove an army-issued white Peugeot. Rothman navigated the military the way he navigated the camp. He scrounged, he stole, he lied, he procured, he knew instinctively what his superiors wanted and gave it to them. He knew what I wanted but never gave it to me.
It was October, and we basked in the dregs of summer. The sun was bright and caught on the twisted limbs of the ficus trees that lined the boulevards. I canted my head out the window as we drove through the city toward the Yarkon River. We passed Sheikh Munis, an abandoned Arab village inhabited by Jews from Syria and Yemen. We saw Bedouin shepherds grazing their sheep near a supermarket, and the construction site that would one day become Tel Aviv University. We drove to Tel Baruch, the road lined with sabras, the thorny leaves big as plates, and citrus trees heavy with orange and pomelo.
I’m hungry, I said.
I’ll feed you when we’re finished, Rothman said.
I grumbled but he only grinned and promised to stop at our favorite restaurant on Yehuda Ha Maccabee Street on the way back to our apartment, where we’d feast on shawarma, mujadra, and malabeh, for which the Syrian owner wouldn’t charge because every month or so Rothman brought him two dozen cartons of Gitanes that disappeared from a ship’s manifest. Rothman spun the radio dial past Radio Lebanon and Radio Cairo, to Kol Yisrael, the Voice of Israel. I kept my eyes on the trees and sun-scorched fields rushing past so as not to stare at him. My gaze was like a homing pigeon unable to stop itself from returning to its cote.
We soon entered the gates of Beit HaHayal, once a sanitarium for British soldiers during the First and Second World Wars, and we pulled into a parking spot beside a fig tree, the scent a narcotic for wasps, buzzing and slurping at the nectar before burrowing into the fruit to lay their eggs. Rothman removed a box from the trunk and lifted it onto his shoulders. I noticed the way his uniform stretched across his back and his belt cinched his waist. I noticed everything about Rothman—the way he sat with his legs crossed, spoke with his hands, how he threw his head back and his jugular throbbed when he laughed, how he smoked and drank and ate and swallowed and smelled like cinnamon and treated me like a bratty sister, and how even in his sleep, he opened his arms and made room for me in his bed when I had nightmares.
