What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (6 page)

“Your mother,” the woman called. “Where’s your mother?” she said.

“Hanging what’s wet,” Aheret said, and pointed through the wall to the lines.

“Come, come,” the woman said, grabbing Aheret’s arm, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as they both rushed around the house.

With a clothespin in her mouth and a wet sock in her hand, Yehudit looked at the pair hurrying toward her and tilted her head to the side.

“Is this the one I bought?” Rena yelled, pulling Aheret. “Is this the one that’s mine?”

And Aheret, who had never been told the story of her near death, was more surprised by her mother’s answer than by the question of the lady who pulled her. For Yehudit dropped the sock into the basket and pulled the clothespin from her lips and said, “Yes, yes. This is the one that’s yours.”

· · ·

Despite the fact that the hilltops were forever facing, the difference between the two families’ lives and the two families’ fates had put far more distance than the geography in between. To anyone who still knew she was up there, Rena was simply
the old woman in the olive grove, while Yehudit, with her brood, took advantage of the settlement’s great blooming and lived a vibrant life.

Yehudit had not forgotten her sister founder, who, despite her great sacrifice, had been dealt a harsh life. She’d gone over every few months to check on Rena, and Yehudit always acted surprised to discover that she carried with her a cake or a cooked chicken in the bag in her hand. As loyal as she was to Rena, she could tell that all her troubles had turned the woman hard. And though Yehudit took her children to visit other lonely souls, it had been a very long time since she’d taken any of them up to visit Rena in the grove. Because of this, Rena hadn’t set eyes on Yehudit’s daughter in years, and the same went for Aheret in relation to the woman she knew from her mother as Mrs. Barak.

Rena had let go of Aheret’s arm to pull a little Nokia phone from the pocket of her skirt. It was a phone no different from the other million phones the supermarkets had given away when the cell towers went up. She held this out to Yehudit and her daughter, as if looking at it alone would let them read the calls inside.

“Tzuki,” she said. “My last boy has been killed.”

Yehudit and Aheret, like every citizen of that country, were up-to-date on the national news of the day. There’d been nothing in Lebanon or Gaza, no terrorist attack listed on the radio at the top of the hour. It was a quiet September morning.

But it wasn’t any outside force, not politics, or religion, that did Tzuki in. It was Israel’s own internal plague that had taken him, the one that took more children of Israel than all the bloodshed and hatred of all their long wars combined. “Hit,” Rena said. “The coastal highway. Run off the road by a boy driving one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour.”

“
Baruch dayan emet
,” Aheret said. And then: “Mercy upon you, a terrible loss.”

“Sit, sit,” Yehudit said, overturning the basket of clean laundry and helping Rena to sit down. “Another tragedy,” she said. “How many can fall on one home?” As she said this, she stepped over to the eaves and began tearing wildly at a little mint plant, one among many at the side of the house. She held these leaves out to Aheret, letting them fall in wet clumps into her daughter’s hands. “Go,” she said, “make Rena a hot cup of tea.”

Before Aheret ran off, Rena had ahold of her skirt. “No need for tea,” she said to Yehudit. “We’re not staying long.”

And here, Aheret, who did not know the story of her childhood sickness, who did not know of the deal that had been struck, reflected on this statement along with the exchange she’d heard earlier.

Growing up, Aheret would lie with her head in her mother’s lap and beg her to run her fingers through her hair, and to tell the stories that came before remembering. The one Yehudit always told with great pride was that once upon a time, there were in this place two empty mountains that God had long ago given Israel but that Israel had long forgotten. And one day, two brave families had come to settle those mountains. The first had three young boys, and the other came up that hill alone and bore a baby girl who was, for the future of their settlement, as great a gift as Adam’s finding Eve.

Aheret now stared at her mother, and knew from her face that there was another story she’d not been told.

“Look this way,” Rena said, pulling at that skirt, drawing Aheret’s eyes to her. “Look to me, at
this
face. Here is where your questions now go.”

Rena then pulled hard at the skirt, not to draw Aheret
down, but to pull herself up. Standing, staring at Aheret, she said, “Come along.”

“Please,” Yehudit said. “You can’t really want it this way? Today—despite your sadness—is not really any different. Tzuki, before this accident, was already, to you, long gone.”

“A child distant,” Rena said, “a child rebellious, a child cut off in head and heart, it is not the same as no child at all. You have always been a smart woman,” Rena said. “And what takes place here is not remotely equal. But in a moment, you’ll have the first tiny inkling of how I three times over feel.”

“It was a joke,” Yehudit said, panicked and referring back to their deal. “The whole thing a silly superstition. You said yourself—almost thirty years ago, and I remember like yesterday—you said it was just old-country mumbo jumbo, a worried mother’s game.”

“A deal is a deal,” Rena said to Yehudit. And to Aheret, she said, “Daughter, come along.”

· · ·

The woman had just buried her last son. The woman gone mad. And Yehudit, who had been through it all with her, who had built this giant city at her side, thought it would not hurt to send her daughter to walk the woman back, to help her into her mourning, to stay and offer comfort and maybe cook for her a meal. Think about it. A husband killed at the start of her new life. Two sons cut down as heroes and a third, already lost to her, run off the side of the road. And here was Yehudit, blessed with nine, all healthy and happy, and with a husband she loved who was often far from her side but who sent back Jew after Jew in his stead. Benevolent, Yehudit sent Aheret with her. And Aheret, only half filled in on the story and half comprehending,
was a dutiful daughter and understood the strange favors that sometimes fell to a neighbor when someone was in pain.

As the pair started to walk down the hill, Aheret turned back toward her mother, hoping for a signal, trying to communicate while maintaining respect under this watchful woman’s eye. And Rena said, “I can see the question you are trying to ask, daughter. The answer is simple. You were sold to me as a child. And, for all intents and purposes, you are mine.”

“Mother!” Aheret called to Yehudit, unable to contain herself.

But it was Rena, again holding her skirt, who gave the girl a yank and said, “What?”

· · ·

“It is the madness of grief,” the rabbi said as Yehudit trailed after him in the supermarket. She’d tracked him down, first by calling the shul, and then the
kolel
, and then the school, where his secretary said he’d run out to the supermarket for supplies. That’s where Yehudit found him, pushing a cart tumbled full with cartons of ice cream, a treat to the students for some charitable act. He’d said, “We do the right thing because it is right—that doesn’t mean a child can’t be rewarded just the same.” As for the story he was hearing, he said, “When the shiva is over, I can promise you,
bli neder
, that Mrs. Barak won’t want to treat such a trivial pledge as a binding contract at all.”

Yehudit stood there in the freezer aisle and looked as if she was going to weep. The rabbi nodded in the way thoughtful rabbis do. He was a tall man, and slim, and even into his later years his beard had stayed black. He looked twenty years younger than he was, and so when he smiled at her kindly, there was a separate sort of calm that Yehudit felt, a husbandly calm,
which was very fulfilling in the moment, with her own husband so far away.

“I know you don’t want to say it,” the rabbi said, “but it is not
lashon hara
to point out between us that you’re afraid Rena’s heart has hardened over all these lonely years.”

“That is what I fear,” Yehudit said.

“Then let me pose for you a scenario of a different sort. Even if she takes you to rabbinical court, and you face the
beit din
over this case, can you imagine such a thing holding up?” When she did not answer, he said it again. “Well, can you imagine me taking her side?”

“No,” Yehudit said.

“So let us remember that without that woman, as much as without you, the great miracle that is our lives in this place would not be. And even if she’d contributed nothing to its founding, even if—God forbid—she had only taken, and done harm, still, can we not pity her in this time of grief? Especially a woman who has known sadness so much more than joy?”

“Yes,” Yehudit said. Though the question was not wiped from her face.

“Go on,” he said, “what is it?”

“Can you tell me, Rebbe—and I understand the word—but what, with my daughter taken, does
pity
mean?”

“It means would it hurt Aheret to stay by this woman’s side through to the end of the period of mourning?”

Yehudit went to answer, and the rabbi raised a silencing hand. “After their ice cream, I will send up the boys to pray. I will send up some girls to help. Your daughter will not be left alone. And if harboring such a fantasy allows Rena to survive this week, how bad is it to indulge for a little while?”

“And what if she doesn’t give it up?”

“Then you will convene a rabbinical court, over which I myself will preside. And I promise you, even if it’s an hour
before Shabbat that you come to me, I will find another two
rabbanim
, and we’ll settle the matter right then. But I will not bring one of the two mothers of this community, who has just lost her last son, to stand in judgment today.”

“All right,” Yehudit said. “If Aheret is willing, I will let her stay until Rena rises from mourning.”

· · ·

The period of shiva was not like it was for Mati, and not like it was for Yermiyahu. It better resembled how it had been when she’d lost her husband, Hanan. The new people of the city did not know Rena. And the staunch Mizrahi religious had forgotten her son when she herself had cut him off. Many others in town, though they did not say it, felt the boy had been punished for his evil ways, and they worried that, in visiting his mother, such a thought might show up in their eyes. So they made themselves busy with other things, and they told themselves they would visit on another day, until all the days were done.

Once again, the minyan at Rena’s shack was comprised of volunteer boys sent from a yeshiva down the hill. The main difference was that the girls were sent along with them to try to cheer her, and, of course, there was Aheret, taking care.

When Rena addressed Aheret, she’d say, “Daughter, some tea,” or “Daughter, a biscuit.” And those bright student girls who sat with Rena could not understand why this woman grieved for her son but her daughter did not cry over her brother. To them, Rena would say, “A very long story, how I alone sit shiva and the sister does not mourn.”

For Aheret, sleeping on a cot in that one-room shack, her only peace was on her nightly walk to the outdoor bathroom. Plumbed though it was, it was separate from the house. On
her way, Aheret would sneak over to the boulder on which the memorial obelisk stood. She would read the names of the town’s fallen by flashlight and understand that her sacrifice was small.

Yehudit came every day to pay her respects, and to see that the girl who had been her daughter was well. She took it upon herself to bake a simple cake for the final service of the shiva, so that she would be there when the bereaved stood up from mourning and first exited the house.

Poised in the sun with Aheret at her side, Yehudit watched in silence as Rena circled the top of the hill, enacting the traditional walk that marked the week’s close. When Rena arrived at the door once again, Yehudit wished her a long and healthy life, then took Aheret’s hand and said, “Come, my child, let’s go.”

Rena tilted her head, quizzical, just as Yehudit had when Rena came around the house, dragging Aheret her way. “Where do you take my daughter?” Rena said. “The end of the week does not end the bond.”

Yehudit had planned for this moment, rehearsing it ceaselessly in her head. She pulled from her pocket the original bill with which Rena had paid her. She’d saved it as a keepsake all these years.

Rena laughed. “
Lirot
?” she said. “Not even valid currency anymore.”

“Then I’ll pay in shekels, or dollars. You name your price.”

“A price on a girl like this?” Rena said. “What kind of mother would sell her daughter?”

“You know why I did it,” Yehudit said. “To save her.”

“I also know when you did it. And I know what has changed.” Rena signaled all that was around them. “What did we pay for these hills so many years before? Now think of what it would cost to buy the city that sits atop them. Understand, Yehudit—I’m alone in the world but for my daughter. For all
the riches this world contains, I wouldn’t sell her away. She is my peace, and my comfort”—and here Rena stepped over and put a delicate touch on Aheret’s cheek, “my life.”