The Devil's Arithmetic (2 page)

“Hannah!” her father said again and her mother stared at them so fiercely over the seat that they drew themselves into opposite corners, staring out their windows with expressions of injured innocence.

A few miles farther on, Aaron begged, “Tell me a story, Hannah, please. Please.
Please
.”

“For God's sake, tell him a story,” her father said, pounding his right hand against the steering wheel. Driving in city traffic always made him cranky.

Glad to be doing something she knew she was good at, Hannah began a gruesome tale about the walking dead, borrowing most of the characters, plot, and sound effects from a movie she'd seen on television the night before. Aaron was fascinated by it. The zombies had just marched into the hero's house and eaten his mother when they arrived at the apartment house complex.

While their father parked the car, Hannah and Aaron raced into the building. Because he was the youngest, Aaron got to press the elevator button.

“That's not fair . . . ,” Hannah began. But then she remembered how scared she'd been the first time she'd had to ask the Four Questions at the Seder and she
stopped. Instead she reached out and held his hand tightly as the elevator rose to the ninth floor in a single great swoop.

“Hannahleh, how much you've grown,” Aunt Rose said. “Twelve years old and already a beautiful young lady.”

Hannah smiled and pulled away as soon as she could.

“Thirteen,” she said. It was almost true. She didn't ask Aunt Rose how anyone could be beautiful with mouse-brown hair and braces on her teeth. Aunt Rose thought everyone in the family was the
most
beautiful,
the
smartest,
the
greatest, even if it wasn't true.

Escaping Aunt Rose's attentions by going into the bathroom, Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. There was a lipstick stain where Aunt Eva had kissed her on the forehead. She ran some water and tried to scrub it off, feeling guilty because Aunt Eva was her favorite aunt, the only one who preferred her over Aaron. Hannah was even named after some friend of Aunt Eva's. Some
dead
friend. The lipstick wouldn't come off completely. Brushing her bangs to hide the mark, Hannah left the bathroom worried that someone else might be lying in wait for her, and dreading it.

NO ONE EVEN NOTICED HANNAH
'
S ENTRANCE INTO THE
living room. They were all in a tight semi-circle around Grandpa Will. He was sitting in the big overstuffed chair in front of the TV set, waving his fist and screaming at the screen. Across the screen marched old photos of Nazi concentration camp victims, corpses stacked like cordwood, and dead-eyed survivors. As the horrible pictures flashed by, a dark voice announced the roll of camps: “Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmno, Dachau . . .”

“Give them this!” Grandpa Will shouted at the TV, holding up his left arm to the set. The sleeve of his shirt was rolled up above the elbow. The photograph of a Nazi colonel, standing sharply at attention, flashed by. “I'll give them this!”

Aunt Eva was shaking her head as Uncle Sam snapped off the TV set. Then she murmured, “Please forgive him, please. It was the war.” Her voice was as soft as a prayer.

Hannah sighed. “He's starting again,” she whispered to Aaron.

Aaron shrugged.

Hannah could scarcely remember when Grandpa Will didn't have these strange fits, showing off the tattoo on his left arm and screaming in both English and Yiddish. When she'd been younger, the five-digit number on his arm had fascinated her. It was a dark blue, very much like a stain. The skin around it had gotten old, but the number had not. Right after Aaron's birth, at his
bris
party, when all the relatives had been making fools of themselves over him, Hannah had taken a ballpoint pen and written a string of numbers on the inside of her own left arm, hard enough to almost break the skin. She had thought that it might please Grandpa Will as much as the new baby had. For a moment, he'd stared at her uncomprehendingly. Then suddenly he'd grabbed at her, screaming in Yiddish
Malach ha-mavis
over and over, his face gray and horrible. Everyone at the party had watched them. It had taken her father and Aunt Eva a long, long time to calm him down.

Even though they tried to explain to her what had upset Grandpa Will so, Hannah had never quite forgiven him. It took two days of hard scrubbing before the pen marks were gone. She still occasionally dreamed of his distorted face and the guttural screams. Strangely, though she'd never dared ask what the words meant, in her dreams she seemed to know. No one had ever volunteered to tell her. It was as if they'd all forgotten the incident, but Hannah had not.

“Mama,” Hannah said when the TV was turned off
and calm restored at last to the room, “why does he bother with it? It's all in the past. There aren't any concentration camps now. Why bring it up? It's embarrassing. I don't want any of my friends to meet him. What if he shouts at them or does something else crazy? Grandpa Dan doesn't shout at the TV or talk about the war like that.”

“Grandpa Dan wasn't in the camps, thank God. He was born in America, just like you. That's because my family came over to this country in the early 1900s, second class. Not steerage.” She got that faraway look that signaled she was about to recite another part of the family saga.

Hannah knew there was only one escape.

“I think I'll help Aunt Eva in the kitchen,” she said quickly, and ran from the room before her mother could continue.

Although it was Grandma Belle's place to light the candles in her own home, over the years it had become a family tradition to let Aunt Eva do it, compensation for her not having a house or family of her own. Aunt Eva could have been married, not once but three different times even though, as Hannah's mother had pointed out, she was no great beauty. But Aunt Eva had preferred living with her brother, Will, and his wife and helping them raise Hannah's father when Belle was away at work.

“Why did she do it?” Hannah had often asked.

“Because she wanted to” was the only answer her father had ever given.

“Maybe she likes kids,” Rosemary suggested once. “Maybe she likes cleaning house. I have an aunt like that.”

“And what does she do?” Hannah had asked.

“She's a nun.”

“Don't be a jerk. Jews don't become nuns.”

“So they live with their brother and take care of his kids.”

“His kid,” Hannah said. “My father's an only child.”

But none of the answers satisfied Hannah's need for romance and a perfect story. Still, she eventually stopped asking the questions, and the only issues she ever brought up with Aunt Eva herself had to do with everyday things. Like how many teaspoons of sugar went into a glass of iced tea. Or what took a stain out of a leather skirt. Or how to knit a scarf. Or make potato soup. Or where to find a pair of old-fashioned shoes for the school play. Aunt Eva had always had the answers to those sorts of things.

When Hannah had been younger, Aunt Eva's answers had seemed magical. But as Hannah got older, the magic disappeared, leaving Aunt Eva a very ordinary person. Hannah hated that it was so, so she pushed the thought away.

Still, when Aunt Eva lit the holiday candles, broad hands encircling the light, her plain face with its deep-set coffee-colored eyes took on a kind of beauty. The flickering flame made her look almost young. Watching Aunt Eva saying the prayers over the candles was the one moment in all the family gatherings that Hannah had always found special. It was as if she and her aunt
shared a particular bond at those times, as if the magic was still, somehow, alive.

“A
yahrzeit
for all the beloved dead, a grace for all the beloved living,” Aunt Eva always whispered to Hannah before reciting the Hebrew prayers. Hannah whispered along with her.

Even Aaron tried to get in on the act, but he mumbled the words a full beat behind. Annoyed, Hannah poked him in the side, but he shifted away. In frustration, she caught up the fleshy part of his upper arm between her fingers and pinched. He cried out.

“Hannah!” her father said sharply.

Hannah felt her face grow red and she looked down at her plate.

DURING THE ENDLESS SEDER DINNER AND THE EVEN MORE
endless explanations from the Haggadah, Hannah frequently glanced out the window. A full moon was squeezed between two of the project's apartment buildings.

Her grandfather droned on and on about the plagues and the exodus from Egypt. Maybe it was an interesting story if someone else told it, Hannah thought, but Grandpa Will had a voice that buzzed like the plague of locusts, and he made sour lessons at every pause. The Seder wasn't even in the right order, not like they taught in Sunday school. When Hannah tried to protest, she was shushed down by Uncle Sam.

“It's Will's way. Don't make trouble,” he said.

Hannah stared at the moon. Tomorrow they'd be going to Grandpa Dan's for the next Seder. At least there would be three cousins her own age, all boys, but that couldn't be helped. And they'd get to sit at the
kitchen table away from the grown-ups. And Grandpa Will wouldn't be there shouting and making a scene, only Grandpa Dan. Sweet, gentle, silly Grandpa Dan, who told stories in between the readings and said things like “How do I know? I was there!”

Beside her, Aaron was moving restlessly, getting ready to ask the Second Question. With the
yarmulke
covering his fair hair, he looked like a miniature Grandpa Will. Hannah almost laughed aloud remembering what Rosemary had asked at her first—and only—holiday visit: “Why do they wear those beanies?”

Aaron's hands shook and a page in the Haggadah flipped over by itself. Hannah reached out and smoothed it back for him and he smiled up at her gratefully. He has the greatest smile, Hannah thought.
He
won't need braces.

“Stop worrying,” she mouthed at him.

At her urging, he plunged into the Second Question, chanting the Hebrew perfectly because he'd memorized it. But when he looked down at the book to read the English translation, he stumbled over the word
herb
, pronouncing the
h
. Uncle Sam snorted and Aaron stopped, mortified. He looked around the table. Everyone was smiling at him. It was clear that he'd made some silly mistake, but he didn't know what it was he'd done. He turned helplessly to Hannah.

“
'Erb
,” she corrected with a whisper. “Don't pronounce the
h
.”

He nodded gratefully and started on the English again, finishing too loudly and in a rush, a sure sign he was unhappy. “On all other nights we eat vegetables and
'erbs
of all kinds. Why on this night do we eat bitter
'erbs
especially?”

Why indeed
, Hannah wondered.
Since they're so disgusting. Rosemary gets to eat jelly beans and I get to eat horseradish
. “It isn't fair!” She realized suddenly that she'd spoken the last words out loud and everyone had heard. Embarrassed, she stared down at her hands, but her anger at the injustice continued.

“Of course it isn't fair,” whispered Aunt Eva to her, “but what has fair to do with it?” She smiled and, to break the tension, started singing “Dayenu” in her strong, musical voice. The rousing repetitive song carried them all along, even Hannah's mother, who was tone deaf.

Hannah knew it meant “it would have been enough,” but she suddenly felt that nothing was enough except to get out of that room and that Seder in which nothing fair or fun was happening.

And then she remembered the wine. That, at least, was new. When the Seder began again, she would get another glass of watered wine. For the first time, she was being allowed to drink along with the grown-ups.