This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (10 page)

It had been a bad day. Nachum had torn off large pieces of the wallpaper in my bedroom, the pattern of pink and violet swirls that my father had just put up. I had grabbed him and kicked him hard. I had scratched his face and pinched his arm, viciously twisting his skin. Nachum had shrieked, fighting back, and Rivky screamed at me to stop.

My mother had pulled me off my brother, but I kicked furiously in the air. I rushed at him again. I wanted to kill him, this time for real. But my mother dragged me back. Nachum ran down the hallway to his room as my mother turned the lock on my bedroom door, her enraged voice cutting through the hollow wood. “You don’t leave this room for the rest of the day! You don’t dare open this door!”

I sat on my knees on the floor. I gathered the shredded pieces of wallpaper in my hands, sobbing. I cried and cried. Then, still angry, I threw the pieces at the door, watching them fall to the ground. No one came down the hall to talk to me, or to whisper, not even Miri. I lay on the bed, breathing heavily.

It wasn’t fair.

Wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair.

I pulled books off the bookshelves, letting them crash onto the floor. I tore up Miri’s pre-1-A drawing. I curled up on my covers, imagining my mother in the morning, her sorrow and regret when she found me motionless in bed, dead of misery and injustice.

Then I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was dark. Miri was sleeping in her bed. The door to my room was open, but the hall lights were off. The entire house was still. It was strange being up alone so late.

I could see my fairy-tale book on the desk by the window, glowing faintly in the moonlight. I picked it up and climbed onto the desk. I read about the beast and the enchantress who had cursed him for his cold heart. I read about Belle, the beauty, and her poor father, Maurice, lost in the cold forest in search of a rose. Belle came to rescue him after he was caught by the cursed prince. The cursed prince then treated her very kindly and gave her beautiful clothes. But the townspeople came to kill the beast, not knowing that he was really a prince inside. Belle kissed the beast and he turned into a handsome man. In the end, Beauty and the prince got married happily ever after, because he repented his past evil actions, which, to the goyim, means falling in love with a beautiful girl.

The wind moaned against the windowpane. I pressed my nose to the glass, peering at the faraway stars. I could see my reflection in the window, hazel eyes, round face, one dimple. I wondered if I looked like Nachum. Blimi said I didn’t, but still. Maybe I was really his twin, and they just weren’t telling me.

I heard a sound from the kitchen.

I climbed off the desk, listening. I tiptoed out of my room and down the hall. A car passed by just then on the street, the flashing headlights lighting up the kitchen, showing a jumble of shadows. The fridge hummed, looming in the darkness like a dozing ghost.

I tiptoed past my brother’s room, past my sleeping parents. In my mother’s workroom at the end of the hall, the buttons on the fax machine blinked, curled sheets of waxy paper waiting in the tray. But what I saw first was the forbidden door. It had been left ajar.

I walked quietly toward the closet. The old bulb attached to the side wall shone faintly over the shelves. My mother had forgotten to shut it off. I looked down. The slat by the threshold where my toes rested stared up at me, beckoning.

I looked over my shoulder at the silent hallway. Then I bent down quickly, slid my fingers under the linoleum-covered panel, and pulled. The floor opened easily.

Underneath the false floor, in the deep and mysterious space, lay gift-wrapped boxes covered in silver, containers filled with old papers, and a red safe with no key. The papers in the containers were covered in small Hebrew writing. Maybe they were letters from the Holocaust. Maybe from the Inquisition. Chaya Sarah’s father had letters from King Solomon when he built the first temple; he had bought them (she said) straight from a descendant of Solomon himself.

Near the gift boxes lay the wedding album that I had looked at with my father. Underneath it were other albums, an old green one and a larger beige one with faded words on the cover, both filled with pictures of my mother’s childhood and marriage. Then I saw a small box tucked into the corner, behind the papers. Sitting comfortably on my knees, I reached over and pulled it out. I pressed it hard against my thigh and tugged at the cover, but it stubbornly stuck. I pulled and pulled, but still it would not come off. Then, finally, it did, and piles of pictures surged out, spilling onto my skirt and around my feet.

I sifted through the photos, mostly old ones in black and white, of tombstones and strange cities, of buildings and roads I did not know. Some of the pictures had people in them. Words and dates were scribbled on the back. I did not recognize the faces.

I took out the last batch of photos and stared. I could not understand.

In the first picture there stood a soldier holding a long rifle. He wore a khaki uniform, a helmet, and boots laced up over his ankles. The soldier pointed the rifle at the camera. There were more pictures of this soldier, pointing his gun proudly, or with his arms around friends, smiling. I saw an army truck parked behind him in one photo. In another, he was standing by the window of the driver’s seat, looking intently ahead.

The last picture was half the size of the others, so much smaller that I nearly skipped it. There a pretty girl with long hair stood close beside the soldier. She was laughing, and in her face there was joy. The soldier was laughing too. Both the girl and the soldier had sparks in their eyes, as if they shared a secret.

For a long time I sat by the closet, looking at this picture. I knew this soldier, with his badge and his khakis, his trimmed beard and his gun. Such guns they gave only to soldiers, men who fought in the army. I knew the girl too, with her long hair—red like fire, uncovered, unscarved—standing by the man as if it was nothing.

These faces I knew.

The girl with the red hair—that was my mother. And the soldier beside her, grinning, was my father.

When my mother first walked through Aunt Tziporah’s neighborhood sometime in ninth grade, she was shocked. She had never known that people could live this way, with families of eight in one-room apartments, with bathwater cooking in pots on the stove.

Tziporah’s mother looked old. Her suffering was etched into the skin of her hands, into the wrinkles of her silent face. She did not wear makeup like Savtah Miriam; she did not have shoes that matched her skirts. When Esther walked toward Tziporah’s apartment, she passed children carrying blocks of ice for the icebox, and barefoot toddlers with pebbles for toys. She passed old men on stoops waiting patiently for the Messiah, and women with glazed eyes, half mad from poverty, illness, and childbirth.

My mother had never known a fatherless girl before. She’d never been friends with a child who did not have both parents at home. She’d known of this side of the city, where the poor lived, but not like this, up close, where you could see the poverty strung up on sagging clotheslines, in patched pants and worn-out shirts, snaking through backyards and front porches.

Tziporah did not always come to school on Fridays. She stayed home to clean for the Sabbath while her mother and older sister worked. There were other such girls who missed school before the holiday, whose fathers had died years before, or whose mothers had long since gone crazy.

When Esther left home on Fridays, she asked the cleaning lady mopping the spacious, tiled roof porch of their home to notify her mother, out shopping for the Sabbath, that she’d be back soon.

The week before, Tziporah had paid an unexpected visit to my mother’s family’s apartment on Ben Kadosh Street. My mother had let her in, but first she had run down the hall to her father and frantically begged him to hide. He could stay in the master bedroom and write his papers there, she implored. Tziporah must not see that she had a father, one who was alive and well.

It was the same with parent-teacher meetings in school. Most of the students did not have a parent who could attend. Their older sisters came in their stead. For how many girls had a mother, both functional and sane, with the time and energy to show up, much less to come dressed in four-inch heels and a custom wig? Savtah Miriam did not like it, but my mother refused to let her go. Let Chana go instead, she insisted. It was embarrassing to be one of the only fortunate ones.

So my mother, walking to Tziporah’s home, readied herself for a quiet place, one filled with sadness and silence. She wondered what she’d say. The thought passed through her mind that maybe it was wrong of her to visit. Maybe Tziporah would be filled with shame.

When she arrived at Tziporah’s building, she heard loud voices—laughter. A door to her left swung open. A group of teenage boys trooped out, chuckling, and she heard her friend’s giggle from inside. Two children stood by the threshold, holding up a covered pan. Two more came up behind them.

Tziporah appeared in the doorway.

“Esther!” she shouted. “Come in! We were just talking about my brother’s latest prank.” She pointed to four girls who were laughing as they sat around the kitchen table cracking nuts and slicing up kiwis and apples.

It was hard to hear the sadness in a home that loud and happy, with neighbors coming by, friends strolling in, and the boys chasing one another in circles around the apartment. Tziporah didn’t seem to know that she was a poor, fatherless girl. She did not seem to notice that she lived in a two-bedroom apartment with the only fridge on the block. The neighbors often brought food to store in the family’s freezer: Koplowitz’s chickens, Shteinmitz’s kugels, and the widow Kleinbart’s homemade ice cream. In the bedroom were a dozen thin mattresses piled high, six for the Eichenstein family, who had just emigrated from Czechoslovakia. No one seemed to think it strange that thirteen people had been sleeping in the hallway and living room of a two-bedroom apartment for the last three months. Friends and family strolled through the open door throughout the day, passing jokes, gossip, and fruit around the kitchen as if it was Purim. If there was misery, it got lost in the din.

“The house on Ben Kadosh Street was the center of society,” my mother often said. “But the one near the border was the center of social life. Oh, the evenings we spent there, laughing…”

And Shloimy, Tziporah’s oldest brother, was the funniest of them all. Everywhere he went, he was followed by friends. It was the Friday after that first one that my mother saw him. She heard an angry shout and a mischievous laugh. A tall boy—sixteen, maybe—rushed out the door, Tziporah right behind him. She was holding over his head a bucket of dirty water. The boy saw my mother. He flashed a wide smile, then leaped over the steps and fled.

“This is for my brother—for his head,” Tziporah said. “For you!” she shouted at the receding figure. “Can’t wait even a
minute
for the floor to dry!”

And that was how my mother first met my father.

I told only Kathy that my father had been a soldier. She couldn’t ruin my marriage. Nobody listened to gentiles. Then I told the twins down the block.

I didn’t mean to say it. It was just that it had been in my head for so long, I didn’t realize when it burst out through my mouth.

When I first told Ruchela and Leah that my father was a soldier, they didn’t believe me. Then they did, and I wished they hadn’t, but it was too late. They said it was almost like being a goy. Now we would really never get married.

I explained to Ruchela and Leah that I had been just joking. I had only
dreamt
that he had been a soldier. It was a very real dream. But they said that I was lying, and I was terrified that they’d tell their parents, who’d tell mine, who’d send me off to Israel instead of Nachum. So I changed the subject and told them about the swings that my father was going to build, right by the side of our house. Then Briendy, the twins’ older sister, came by, hopped up the steps, and said, “’Kay, let’s play school.”

Briendy was horribly bossy. When we played school, she was always the teacher. If we didn’t listen, she would hit us. I didn’t want to play school now. I wanted to play only if I was teacher. Briendy hit me. I hit her back. She said I was committing a great big sin, because she was older, and in the Torah it said that I had to listen to her.

“Does not,” I said loudly. “It says that I have to listen to my mother and father, and my mother and father never said you could always be the teacher.”

Briendy said fine. I could be the substitute teacher, but only when she got sick. I said okay, I’d be the substitute teacher, but only if she got sick and died now.

She hit me again. I said, “You’re the worst teacher and I’m the principal. You’re fired!” Then Ruchela, Leah, and I ran away from her to the other side of our house. We hid behind a bush near the yard. We giggled and crouched down low. Ruchela was about to whisper something when I saw her eyes widen. Just then Briendy screamed
“Boo!”
right into my ear from behind, and I fell backward from fright. When I stumbled back up, Briendy was staring at something in the garden. I was going to tell her that she was the most evil person ever, and in the Torah it says all sorts of things about people like her, but Briendy wasn’t listening. She was pointing at Nachum, standing near the bush at the corner of our garden.

“Look,” she said.

Nachum was eating berries straight from the bush. They were tiny berries, hard and dark, and Briendy said they were poisonous. We stared at Nachum eating them. He shook his head up and down as he ate, nodding to someone who wasn’t there.

Ruchela and Leah turned to me. “He’s eating poison,” Leah said, her eyes opened wide.

“I know,” I said. “But they’re not really poisonous—my father, he said they’re not really poisonous.” I said this so it wouldn’t look weird that I wasn’t stopping him from dying.

My father had never said anything of the sort. The berries were probably poison; they definitely looked it. But I wouldn’t have seen Nachum eating them if not for Briendy, so it wasn’t my job to make him stop. Maybe this was God’s mysterious way. He wouldn’t make my brother uncrazy—that was too big of a miracle—but He could make him die from berries.

Nachum ate a lot of berries. He only stopped when a fire truck passed by. Then he went inside, his hands and face sticky and red. I followed him into the living room. I wanted to see if he would die. My mother came out of her workroom right then and cried out worriedly when she saw him.

“What is that?” she asked, holding up his hand. “What did you eat? What did you do? What in heaven’s name is that?”

I didn’t tell my mother what Nachum had eaten, because I wanted the poison to work. Nachum just shook his head this way and that and blinked his eyes, mumbling.

My mother washed off his hands. She wiped his face clean as he twisted away. Then I followed him to his room and watched him play, waiting.

Soon it was evening and we were all in bed. I stayed up, still waiting. Nachum had fallen asleep already, earlier than on most nights, and I sat in my bed till close to midnight. I passed by his room to check and saw him lying very still, but I couldn’t tell the difference between sleeping and dead and I didn’t know how long it would take. Then I went back to my room and fell asleep myself.

When I woke up it was light in my room. The sun shone through the shades. A school bus honked outside in the street, and I heard my mother’s admonishing voice: “Nachum, no! Not the cocoa! No!”

Nachum was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, his face smeared with dark powder. My mother had forgotten to tie his leg to the bed. He had spilled the entire container of cocoa out onto the floor while everyone was sleeping and was licking it off his hands.

He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t even sick. He was eating cocoa off the floor. The berries weren’t poison, and Briendy was an evil, bossy liar.