I went to Mr. Altschuler’s store today to buy some herring. Everything in there reminds me of you, because for forty years you shopped there, bringing home tins of salmon, rye breads with cracking, seed-studded crusts, cabbage, leeks, Shabbos candles, a skinny chicken. On holidays there would be more—potatoes and applesauce, chicken livers, apples for baking with cinnamon and butter. The shelves are colorful and at first glance all you see are the orange labels of the macaroons, green boxes of matzoh meal, and the reds and yellows of the moon-shaped jelly candies. But when you’re seven years old and you have to stand quietly and wait, then you see the dimness of the unfilled shelves behind, the dust balls and spider webs of untouched places, and the cold and melted eyes of the smoked dried fish.
If you had seen me today you would have said “What are you standing there for? Mr. Altschuler doesn’t have all day to wait on someone like you!” as if I were seven again and not a forty-year-old woman with two children to feed. You wouldn’t know what it’s like to stand, unable to move, between the shelves of canned food and the racks of bread, you who walked out of Treblinka alive, pregnant, with a basket on your arm, your life in the hands of a Polish guard who – if he had looked closely – would have seen the Jewish fear in your dissembling eyes. But I stood fingering the glue on a peeling label, managed a look at the back of Mrs. Charnov’s fur hat – you would have liked it, white and luxurious as a Russian snow – and because I was afraid to speak to her, made my way out before I would have to say hello. When Herman asked me later for his herring, I had to say I couldn’t find any, and so avoid that look of pained surprise at my incapacity, as if I had hit him, as if he didn’t already know. Another lie in the face of God, as Father would say, but better than the cold feeling of my husband’s body, stretched, unsleeping, as far from me as possible.
It was that year when I was seven that I began to be aware, not only of what lay behind the bright merchandise of Mr. Altschuler’s shelves, but of all the colors and shades of life around me. Inside, the ruby red of glass drops on candelabra and goblets with patterns of circles shaved from their richness. The carved black cabinet, brooding on its toad legs, accented with gold, that I was never allowed to touch. The hazy gold of afternoons with the curtains drawn, dust sparkling, drifting in the slanting light. The best place was the kitchen with wonderful Viola with her rich brown skin and crazy hair. She always grinned at me, gap-toothed, mustached gray and bristly, and gave me halvah after school, or pickles and bread. And you, your dress a tight-fitting, bodiced blue and green, shimmering like fish skin, your steely hair brushed stiffly back. I would sit on my stool and watch you as you came in to give Viola orders for dinner, letting your eyes rest only briefly on me before you’d turn back to her. Fish tonight, broiled, with roast potatoes, butter okay on the baked apples, milk plates. Tomorrow brisket, horseradish, no sour cream, no milk for Father’s coffee, and leave the lights on for Shabbos. And Viola, in this foreign world she couldn’t understand the reasons for, nodded and grinned, and did it all exactly right.
That was the year Zofia was born. How soft and warm she was, with her sleepy little eyes, wide set and barely slanted, like Father’s – Herman says it’s from Mongol blood mixed with the Jews’ in village raids – and her downy thatch of hair, black like mine. The nurse brought her out to Father and me. He started to unwrap her, hoping, I guess, to see it was a boy, but the nurse said “Better not, she needs to keep warm,” and he dropped the blanket as if it had stung him. “Her name is Zofia,” he said — and I remember how stony his face was, how harsh his voice in the sick room quiet – “may she be a virtuous wife”. He went and smoked then, for a long time, on the porch, while I crept in to look at you. You never saw me. You lay with your eyes closed, breathing heavily. Your hands still gripped loosely the carved wood of the bed posts where I know, now, they must have held like vises in your pain. Only now, now that I have had my two, do I know what it must have taken for you to pass through your labor and Zofia’s birth without ever making a sound I could hear in the kitchen outside your door.
You were different, then, for a while. You would look at Zofia sleeping in your arms with a wondering, tender look as if she were stirring some distant memory of sweetness or love. But then I would make a noise or you’d notice me watching you and the look would go. Or even if you just held her for long enough, I would see the softness fade out of you – as if some other memories intruded – and you would be sitting straight-backed, your lips drawn tight, your arms ever so slightly holding Zofia away from your body. You would speak sharply to me then and put Zofia away from you, and I would go to her and hold her to me, singing my childish songs to make her forget the loss of your warming arms.
That was the year, too, that I stopped being able to play, unless it was with Zofia in her room, first watching her smile and chuckle at me, then later feeling her crash against me, laughing, as she ran unsteadily around. When I was with you I was quiet, watching you, venturing to stroke your hand when you lay back on the sofa with your eyes closed, trying to soften the hard lines around your mouth and eyes. Father would be in his study, rustling papers, speaking vehemently in Yiddish on the phone to the many bearded men who would come on Sundays and talk, gesturing passionately, about the new state, Israel. Sometimes, when he wasn’t there, I would creep in quietly and open the wood boxes, fragrant with cigars, and finger the parchment-like text of the old books, strangely lettered and incomprehensible to me.
Then when I was thirteen something happened that I never understood till your old friend Zara Blaustein revealed to me the secret years later. I felt myself wet one day and went to the bathroom to right myself, where I found, to my astonishment, not urine, but blood in my pants. I wanted to cry out for you but stood, instead, rooted with fear until you opened the door and found me, ineffectually swabbing what was now running down my legs. Shame I expected, but not the sight of you blanching, gasping and turning your back on me to run blindly down the dark hall to your room where you stayed till the next day, till after you had sent Mrs. Blaustein to deal with me and she had bound me up and reassured me. All that night I had lain in my bed, legs held together tight, afraid to move and let loose the flow of blood, afraid to think what I might have done to make you run from me.
Of course I never asked you, nor did I ever again let you see the signs of my body changing, in case it was this that had made you run. When my body developed early, the boys hung about in the afternoons, leaning on the fence, climbing the big tree out front, as if in response to some silent signal I could not control. More than once you called me slut, more than once slapped my face, though I couldn’t help the way I looked, and I was not so different from you. All this, I thought, was for something I had done, until Zara Blaustein told me about an afternoon in hiding, forty miles out of Warsaw, the air even there bitter with the smoke from the burning ghetto. Your young husband – you were both eighteen – not done grieving your being taken in a round-up by the Polish police – burned or shot with the rest of them and buried, if he was lucky, in an unmarked grave with a hundred others. The scene was similar, then, only it was she, Zara, who opened the wood door of the outhouse to find you, wire in hand, blood and tissue streaming down your legs, your face livid and tearless until she brought you inside, washed and cradled you till you cried and screamed in her arms. Then how you lay, the blood still seeping slowly out of you, your eyes fixed unseeing on the rafters, for hours and days until slowly you got up, boiled water, cut up some carrots, and went about the business of your life.
I suppose when Herman wanted to marry me you were relieved. I had stayed, typing Father’s correspondence, taking calls from Russian immigrant agencies, Zionist groups, the clinic in Haifa that Father helped to endow. You were busy entertaining Father’s friends, supervising the making of elaborate trays of cinnamon cakes and strong coffee, or bowls of black Russian caviar with thick-crusted bread. I suppose I was something of an embarrassment by then, an unmarried daughter of twenty-nine, well-educated, all her former suitors long tired of waiting. Zofia was engaged then, and it was only by clever planning on your part that my wedding was to take place before hers.
Herman didn’t know. He thought he was getting a beautiful – if not a young – wife, the daughter of Eva Levkin, called by her admirers “the Duchess” for her beauty and her carriage, as if she had been born of Polish aristocracy instead of a Jewish bookkeeper and his seamstress wife. He thought I would adorn his house, entertain his colleagues with something of your grace and charm, be a warm and loving mother to children who would have my black eyes and hair. Some of this I could do, or could do for a while. Together we would travel, I, that far from you, feeling for the first time a kind of freedom, as of cool air and light entering a musty, enclosed place. Herman had money and his own background of poverty – like you – so to him it was a matter of pride to learn about and buy the warm red, Italian tile, serving dishes of English silver, glazed pots from ancient China. I taught him what I knew, from you, about fine lace, the setting of a ring, the quality of a fur, and he gave me coral necklaces and ruby pins to enhance what he called my exotic beauty.
But time went on and things changed. We were home again, not so far from you. Herman found it hard to understand what came over me sometimes, why he would find me staring out the window, not moving, where I had been for an hour or more, how I could stay up in my room when there was a house to run and maids to oversee. But he didn’t look out on the same world as I did. In a winter snow he probably saw driveways to shovel and sidewalks to salt for visitors. I saw the unrelieved frigidity of the snow, the branches bowed and breaking, and here and there a sodden patch of defeated grass. He didn’t know what it was like to be afraid to talk to two hired girls because of the freedom in their laughing, and the vigor in their strong, plump arms. They, like you, held their heads high and did their work and in their eyes I could see what they thought of me and my incapacity. And then I couldn’t entertain, like you. I could make the cakes and tarts and grilled hors d’oeuvres and set the flowers around the room, but somehow when the first guests arrived, I was always upstairs. Herman did the greeting, and the handing round of drinks, till with heart beating numbly inside me, your smile on my lips, I came downstairs and did my best. Later there would be a fight – I was chilly, I was distracted, I acted like a timid girl. And I would hear your voice again –- what are you so afraid of, where’s your head, what’s wrong with you?
Herman wanted a son, though you, I know, were not so interested, since he would never be a Levkin. I had some vaporous idea of a bundle of softness looking sweetly at me – like Zofia – but with eyes too dimmed by infancy and innocence to see the failings your sharper eyes never missed. Also, the coldness was beginning. Herman came to me less often, and never on days I had given in to thoughts of you, let the listlessness enwrap me like a net of fine silk, soft and unyielding, or parried the more piercing thoughts by venting petty anger on the girls. So I did it, but with a sinking terror behind, as if I were throwing myself over a steep and treacherous slope, with only the hope of a baby’s eyes to save me. He was beautiful. Not like Zofia, but bald and placid, and delighted with me. I held him, remembering Zofia, but remembering, too, the stiffness in your arms, the frozen stare on your face. When Herman criticized me, if in my awkwardness I jarred the baby or bumped his head, I imagined he saw in me the same nameless horror that kept your eyes fixed on emptiness, instead of on your baby’s face.Those years went passably well. I knitted blue sweaters with threads of silver, sewed lambs and ducklings on pillowcases to keep my baby comforted at night. There was a wicker carriage and we would promenade together, I in my straight black coat like yours, he in his blankets and knitted cap. And he would chortle and crow, seeing a snowflake fall, hearing the geese honking overhead and I would try to see the lacey softness of the one, and not hear the lonely braying of the other. If he was quiet too long, a terror would steal over me that peeking over the rim of the carriage top I would find him livid, suffocated while I stood living by.
All that time he was a fat and lusty boy, I played with him, gave him pretty things to make him smile, and watched his face for the first sign he would turn away from me. I saw it at about three but couldn’t be sure – was that a normal boyish tussle to walk by himself, or was he struggling away from me? I thought I saw relief in his running, shouting down the sidewalk. By the time he was six his face was a little Herman’s face, frowning, seeing through me to the fears, the emptiness. The little pillows didn’t comfort him, his mother’s rich clothes didn’t make up for the hollowness he must feel in her affection for him. By the time he was seven, he was waking up every night, as he does now, asthmatic, sitting on the edge of his bed, trying to breathe, gasping and gaping like a fish drowning in air. Herman goes to him, because I cannot, feeling it is I choking the life out of him, fearing his knowing eyes.
Herman wanted another child and so I had her when the boy was three. This one was like Zofia, dark with piercing black eyes. She was my one but by then it was too late. Unable to bear the preciousness of her little fingers, the searching lips, the wrenching little cry, I let her sleep and wait alone in a little room I made for her. As time went on she cried less and less, and when I went in she’d by lying quietly, and without expectation. When I picked her up she melted into me, trying, I suppose, to absorb what warmth and love I had. She is six now, still quiet, trying not to make a noise that will drive me away. She stands, too, by my chair and strokes my hand, and like you, I never turn to her and take her in my arms.
So now I spend my days in my room. There are books here, of other lives, strong women like Anna Karenina who went proudly where despair took her, unflinching, upright, and Anne Frank, who didn’t have the luck or the brutal courage, maybe, to save herself like you did, but who nonetheless created beauty in the face of her doom. There are drawers of scarves and beaded shawls so I can try to look like you, and mirrors for me to see if my full lips and high cheekbones recall your face, or if my coward’s eyes are just a made-up mockery of you. The children come to see me here, play with boxes of your cast-off jewels as if they were a robber’s hoard, then grow wistful in the quiet and creep away till I hear their voices, running, shouting in the grass, where the sunshine is, and little toads between the rocks. Did you run like that in your Polish summers, before the fear and the hiding and the gutted cellars? Did your mother stand at the window and watch and smile, before she was taken, already gray and sure that you were dead, to spend whatever hours or days she had in an agony for you?
There’s not much color now, without you. The house is full of shadows, slanting across the floor, shrouding even the lights in a misty film. When you were lying in the hospital, your face ashen gray, your hair matted on your forehead, the only color was in the dew beaded on your cheeks from the oxygen mask. Your swollen hand lay limp and pale, the glittering ring mercifully removed – the last bit of you – and the rest of you, for once powerless, in the drab blue gown you swore you’d never wear. I sat and watched you, watched your eyes rove unseeing under flickering lids, while your living hand moved vaguely against its restraint. When you died, a series of shuddering breaths softening till there was nothing, I felt I had no air and no will to breathe. I couldn’t understand why I was still sitting, and not lying limp on the floor beside your bed. Your hand was not cold, just waxy and lifeless, your eyes still open as if in disbelief at my living on.
Herman took me away. I have no memory of that night or your funeral the next day. I never saw your face again. The seven days of mourning were a mockery, it seemed, as if at the end of that time we can clap our hands together and say ‘It is enough’ and go on living. We sat in your house, in the dim airless rooms, with the cut surfaces of glass bowls, the cold sheen of the silver all reminding us of you. I could not speak to them, colleagues of father’s, admirers of yours, who came to shower you with praise and shrewdly look at me to see how much of you was in me. Herman talked to them and Father smoked and ate, and outside, the children drooped and pretended to play so no one would ask them in. Zofia came, but didn’t stay – she lives so far away – and looking in her eyes was almost more than I could bear. Not because of you, but because I saw her crying, in my dreams, for her dead mother, who was not you, but I.
Now I do the shopping when I can. I go to Mr. Altschuler’s and the women stop their yiddische gossip to watch me, to see if I am like the Duchess. All I see as I move through the store is your hand on a box of flour, your back turning the aisle just ahead of me. I don’t see any more the greens and oranges on the shelves, only a cloudy gray as if everything were bleached in brine. The fish are dead and stiff, their unlidded eyes a reproach to me, the meat formless and bloody, like some innocent thing slaughtered there. The incessant Yiddish murmuring follows me out – ‘what’s the matter, what is it, what’s wrong with her?’
There is nothing else I can do. I am not made like you. Maybe if I were starved and beaten and woke every day to realize a new bed was empty but I was still alive with my blood warm inside me, maybe I too would walk upright among the sounds of gunfire, instead of cringing between shelves of bread. Maybe the sight of a poppy growing under the barbed wire would be enough, then, to make me thank God for a spot of color in this dreary world. But there is no hardening flame for me. And in the other world, no heaven and hell, only a road underground to Jerusalem to the messiah, who may never come, and to you. Will I be barred from that road, left just to decay among the shreds of linen and wool while the rest of the chosen, and you, revel in the beginning of the world? Or will the road be hard to travel, not soft dust that falls away, but sticky clay and buried rocks, so when I arrive, soiled and matted with mud, the streets are empty and the music gone? No, you will be there, smiling on me as I come, holding Zofia by the hand and in your arms the one in whose place I lived, and for whose sake I thought to die.
- An Errand to my mother - April 5, 2021