by Miryam Sivan
“Not this trip,” she rebuked herself out loud. This was a vacation. Focus on the beauty. “History away.” Isabel ran into the lobby of Jiri’s building and bounded up the stairs to the top floor. She arrived out of breath and happy.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” Jiri opened the studio door after a moment’s delay, looking groggy and preoccupied. “I’m working on an article. Nineteenth-century nature paintings at the National.” Jiri had taken her to that museum last time she was in town. Top of Wenceslas Square. “Boring shit.” Waved her into the room. “Coffee?” He placed a pot of water on a small electric burner.
They sat on a hard wood bench by the window. Smiling and checking each other out. Despite his wrinkled clothing and tired face, Jiri looked his usual sensual self. His light blue eyes and sandy hair, the deep character lines that edged his cheeks, pleased Isabel. This was good. Passion with another man. A distraction. An emotional albeit temporary wedge between herself and Emanuel. Between herself and Zakhi. And she liked Jiri. Simple fact. She liked him a lot.
Jiri sat quietly and didn’t stop smiling at her. Isabel looked back at him, then out to the world. Our Lady’s ribbed vaults, her tall arched stained glass, and menacing black spires filled the sky. Silence dragged on. Last time they met was four months ago. Awkward moments of reconnection.
“Show me how your uncircumcised member works,” Isabel spoke suddenly, delicately, and turned into the room. Turned into the man. She took small sips of tepid coffee as Jiri opened his pants. His hand moved slowly, methodically. When his penis filled with blood, she went over and remembered him. She kissed his wide lined face. His skin smelled of morning shave and a light musk cologne. She kissed his neck. His hair was buzzed close to the skull, Israeli style—not that he knew that—and as they kissed, and as he removed her clothing, she moved her hands over his velvet scalp. Silly clichés came over her during sex. Sometimes in the general loss of control they spilled out.
“My Czech charger,” Isabel moaned and closed her eyes. She bent forward toward the floor as Jiri took her nipple into his mouth. She felt him move deeply into her. “Oh, Prague pony.”
Jiri burst out laughing. Isabel hung her head in shame but Jiri couldn’t stop laughing.
“You’re going to lose your erection,” Isabel retorted sharply and focused on a large knot in the dark wood floor. Normally Jiri’s laughter would have been received as a playful challenge. A higher benchmark to meet. But now it brought Isabel down. Her usual bravado and sense of humor abandoned her. She felt spooked instead.
Jiri saw her unease, slipped out, took her by the hand, and led her to a small mattress in a shadowed corner of the room. He arranged himself on it and gently pulled her down beside him. He kissed her neck, her breasts. Gentle, gentle. Isabel turned her head towards the window. Black spires sliced the sky. Jiri’s lips moved along her body.
“This is for you my precious pussy, my Jewish,” he paused at her pubes, “jam pot.”
She laughed out loud, pulled him up, looked into his eyes, and breathed with him. Outside skies clouded over grey. Jiri entered her again.
“Just like your mother’s house in New York.” Jiri drew himself in and out slowly, rhythmically, teasing out her pleasure. “Same parquet wood floors, same porcelain sink.” He moved harder and faster, memories of their first coupling enflaming them. Jiri watched her face change with excitement. When she came he followed so softly she was not sure he had.
“Neni zač,” Isabel whispered and held him against her.
“Shh.” He tucked his head under her arm. Their braided limbs soft and contented in the dim light of a Prague autumn.
✶
In the initial stages of a book Isabel’s tears and rage often translated into a fierce appetite for life. After a long day breathing in ‘that Holocaust drek’ as Molly called it (Isabel loved Yiddish in an Irish brogue), she sought out music, dance, and mainly sex. The night she met Jiri Stipek, six months ago in April, she was primed to be with a man.
It was a small noisy pub on Houston Street. Her third day of sitting with Jaim Benjamin. Hours of listening to stories. Of asking questions. Of taking it in. A global-warming hot spell fried the city. At the bar, she sat next to this sculptor from Prague. In his late thirties, married with two small children, he was in New York with the works of several Central European artists whose work was being shown at a gallery in Chelsea.
Isabel told him about her trips to Prague and Karlovy Vary. She flirted and declared that the Vinohrady apartments reminded her of the Upper West Side. Same parquet wood floors. High ceilings. Wall moldings and ceiling medallions. Same large white porcelain sinks and tubs. She invited him to Suri’s to corroborate the affinity. Prosim.
Isabel hadn’t brought a strange man to her mother’s apartment since high school. And she could because Suri and her boyfriend, Hal, were visiting friends in Montauk. On the way uptown Isabel led Jiri to the metal slip between subway cars. She leaned him against the cool stainless steel carriage and watched tracks flash through the barrier of swinging chains. They rocked back and forth.
“I haven’t slept with a woman other than my wife in many years. But I’ll make an exception for you, Isabel Toledo.” Jiri stroked her hair and pulled her close. “You’re very beautiful. Like a woman from Spain.” He stroked her ass. Kissed her mouth. “And a gentleman cannot exactly say no to a lady’s direct request. Prosim.”
Isabel undressed Jiri in her childhood bedroom and was immediately besieged by his hairless, muscular, beautifully proportioned, silk-skinned torso, his uncircumcised loveliness. Raised in New York and living in Israel since early adulthood, Isabel was not accustomed to such male members. Hello world. She pushed her tongue into his mouth and murmured her few Czech words over and over again. Dobrý den. Prosim. Děkuji. Good day. Please. Thank you.
✶
“When are you coming to visit me in Israel?” Isabel asked. She and Jiri remained tucked into one another on the small mattress in the corner of his studio. Her back pushed against the wall of cold exposed bricks. In the building next door she imagined Kafka once leaned against these very same bricks on the wall’s other side.
“And your husband?”
“I’m not married.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“Emanuel? What about him?”
“Aren’t you in love?”
“Does it matter?”
“I thought you were a couple.”
“We are and aren’t.” She looked up at the loose strips of paint on the ceiling. “I’m attached to Emanuel. I love him, but I don’t want to live with him. I have a busy enough domestic life with my children. Besides, I bore easily. Park a man in my house and within six months I’ll never want to have sex with him again. I’m restless. Or just plain awful.”
“You don’t ever need to be bored, Isabel Toledo. Come visit me in Prague whenever you want.”
Isabel rolled on top of him and glanced at the small clock on the table. In an hour she was meeting Itka Schwartz at the Intercontinental Hotel. Time enough for another round. While she moaned no, no, not as in don’t, or stop, but as in don’t stop, Jiri pounded yes and yes and yes. Grey light and gothic gloom filled the room. She closed her eyes to not see the corralling of Jews into Josefov. Twelfth century. No. She opened her eyes and stared at the brick wall. The Pope ordered a wall built around them. Thirteenth century. No. Trains and wooden slats exploded in her mind alongside the spot inside of her Jiri insisted on reaching. By force of will, out of terror and desperation, Isabel’s mind became a black screen. Focus on the body she told herself. Only the body. Banish history’s wretchedness. Pleasure instead. Only the body. Whimpering and making a big fool of herself, she finally came, sweaty and exhausted from the effort of wrestling on two fronts. Jiri laced his thick arm around her waist and held her limp body suspended. She was like a piece of stone he looked over to sculpt. She twisted up at the
waist. They kissed. They kissed some more. Sets of kisses dug into soft wet mouths. With his lips Jiri said he adored her. That she revved him up. That she was always welcome to his body. She moved her lips over his. Pressing. Sucking. Tasting. Responded that she adored him too. He enlivened her.
By a crazed white porcelain sink Jiri sponged her clean and dried her with a small towel. She dressed quickly and hurried out to the streets to find Itka before her meeting with the mayor’s representative. No matter that Isabel only knew a few words in Czech, Itka wanted her by her side. “You are my voice, Isabel. Part of my life story. You are my backbone now.” Itka explained herself referring to her memoir that Isabel had written a few years back. Since then they had become close friends. The previous winter Itka invited Isabel for a pampering weekend at the Karlovy Vary spa, and four months ago Isabel came to Prague for the Czech-language publication party of Itka’s book. Post-Communist rule, Itka and her husband Ivan, originally from Bratislava, had an apartment in the city and went back and forth between Bat Yam and Prague. A tentative truce with the past.
Isabel stopped for a moment by the entrance of the Church of Our Lady before Týn. Tycho Brahe’s crypt was inside. She felt a sudden urge to peek at the bronze statue of him with a globe in one hand, and a sword in the other. A man willing to fight for his re-visioning of the cosmos. 1601. But Itka waited and Isabel had no more time for indulgences.
2
“Our synagogues have become museums, relics, shells emptied of life. Just like the Nazis intended,” the commemorative dinner’s first guest of honor thundered from the dais. “But we’re not extinct as the Nazis predicted.” He stared out at the people in the large banquet hall, most of whom were in their seventies and eighties. Wrinkled faces. Thinning hair. Slow reflexes. Long memories. They came from rebuilt lives in the United States, England, Israel. Some from neighboring Germany and other European countries. A number of people Isabel’s age were also present. Children accompanying parents. “But in this city it appears as if we are.” He paused.
People stirred. Murmured. Was he being lauded or criticized? Was his anger a healthy house cleaning or an opening of Pandora’s Box?
“Remember, my fellow Bohemians. Remember that they partially succeeded with their plan. They wiped us out of here.” Slowly he returned to his seat. Isabel stared at the table centerpiece of red and white carnations. Poured herself some more wine. Usually the mood was reflective, elegiac at these kinds of commemorative events. Horrors alluded to. Heroism lauded. Direct mention of specific atrocities avoided. But this man took no pains to hide emotions or particulars. With his words, he allowed for anger, not reconciliation, to saturate the air of the banquet hall.
Another man in an expensive suit approached the dais. “For nearly 800 years the Jews in Praha, were forced to wear special hats, a yellow patch, or Star of David when they left the ghetto for a few hours.” He spoke softly, in excellent almost non-accented American English. “In 1710, Fredrick William I allowed those Jews willing to pay 8,000 thaler to move about the city without the yellow tag. That is about 36,000 dollars in today’s currency. Few could afford such a generous offer. And then in 1781, the Emperor Joseph I issued the Toleration Edict. Civil rights.” A little louder. “Finally accepted, we thought, members of the Empire, citizens of Bohemia, able to live outside the cramped ghetto.” His voice quivered. “But no. One hundred and fifty years later, no time at all in world history, a snap of the fingers, we’re ordered to wear the yellow star again, to return to the ghetto.” He banged the table with a clenched hand. His words tumbled and then burst forth. “But in this ghetto, in Terezin, they don’t let us live our restricted lives. No, in Terezin they intend for us to die, and we do, by disease, starvation, thirst, from heartbreak, and despair. Those strong enough to survive these plagues are sent to Auschwitz to play against its odds.” He clutched the podium. His face reddened.
“I didn’t come here today to accuse.” His voice shook. It was softer. “I didn’t come here to . . . I want to say I’m sorry about my anger, my pain, but I’m not. I was sent to Terezin in 1942 and haven’t been back to Europe since my liberation from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. It’s very hard after so many years.” He paused. “Very hard . . . but I’m here with old friends and former classmates of mine, of my brothers and sisters. When I think of the hundreds, the thousands who are not here . . .”
He cried uncontrollably. His wife and another man came up to the podium and led him to his seat. Isabel glanced over at Itka. Her perennial smile was gone. Her eyes shone with tears. Itka had turned eleven soon after the war began. At fifteen her family was taken to Terezin. At seventeen Germany was defeated. None of her immediate relatives survived. Itka had seen two performances of Krása’s Brundibar in Terezin. Watching them helped her hold on to a sliver of hope. Maybe she’d be with her parents again. She survived Terezin with her Uncle Bruno. Bruno spent time with Ottla Kafka in the ghetto cum camp until she volunteered to accompany a children’s transport to Auschwitz. Years later Itka realized Ottla was Franz Kafka’s youngest sister. Itka’s husband took hold of his wife’s hand and held it firmly.
Grief kicked up in Isabel as she watched them. After forty years, the communist lid had lifted and grievances were finally being aired. Isabel knew what was coming. Property seizures. Round-ups. Transport lists. Hostile, unreceptive neighbors. Ghettos. Labor camps. Concentration camps. The trace which remained of centuries old communities. The long history of Bohemian anti-Semitism. The murder of Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Silesia, and Sudetenland. Frowns and fists would punctuate sentences.
Isabel downed her glass of wine and poured another.
✶
Isabel left the memorial dinner before the official good-nights, begging off a night cap, telling Itka she didn’t feel well, blaming it on the wine.
As she floated back to the hotel she recalled her first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau the summer between high school and college. She had just turned eighteen and spent a month volunteering on a desert kibbutz. Then she toured Europe with another American volunteer. In Rome she decided to go to Poland. Spontaneously. No obvious reason why except that nearly all of Suri’s family had been transported there in cattle cars from the walled city of Kamenets-Podolski. And there they died. Her travelling companion went to Holland.
In Poland Isabel was waylaid by the concentration camps. She staggered before the piles of booty. She breathed in the smell of Zyklon B trapped in heaps of greying-brown hair. She sat down amidst the rubble of gas chambers and ovens. Toed fields of ash and bone. A number of consequential life decisions came to her then in those killing fields.
First: she would return to live in Israel after completing college. Which she did. Within a year of graduation she married Alon. Within two she nursed Lia.
Second: she would dedicate her life to the memory of the murdered millions. Which she began to do eight years after moving to Israel. Impulsively she ghosted the life story of Rosa Levi, her co-worker in the kibbutz kitchen, and never looked back. She had found her niche.
Third: she would make sure that she, and any children she had, would become adept at self-defense. Martial arts and firearms. Which they were. Lia, Yael, and Isabel possessed black belts in karate. Uri began his training the year before.
Sometimes as they stood in the kitchen, Isabel threw one of her tall strong daughters off balance with a surprise ashibaray. The arch of her foot smacked the girl’s shin and her leg lifted off the ground just enough to knock her on her ass when Isabel added a small push.
“Oh yeah?” Lia or Yael on their feet immediately came after her poised to return the blow. Isabel ran from them, laughing hard, round and round the work island they went. If Uri came into the room and saw one of his sisters chasing their mother, he knew they were sparring. He’d come around from the other side and jump on Isabel. Tackling her to the floor, they’d tickle her until she peed her pants.
An
d there were times, as she waited in the car for Uri to come out from karate class, that she thought about Bella, Suri’s mother, who knew nothing of self-defense. Or of guns. Or offensive or defensive strategies. Bella knew nothing about mass murder and ideologically driven expulsion. She lived in Kamenets-Podolski and kept a kosher home. She loved her children and respected her hard working husband. Bella, not unlike hundreds of thousands of women her age all across Europe, remembered the First World War, though she had only been a child. When the second one began she expected a tragic repeat of those earlier devastating hostilities. Food shortages. Men conscripted. Arrogant soldiers. Only this time it was worse. Within days of this second German occupation, appalling decrees were published against the Jews. Their movements restricted. Their work lives demolished. They weren’t allowed to own objects of value. Including jewelry. Including pets.
Eventually they were moved into a ghetto. Then the strong were taken to labor camps. The rest by truck to the woods. There they dug their own graves. Stripped naked. Neighbor next to neighbor. Mothers hid children between exposed limbs. They made our mothers strip in front of us. Here mothers are no longer mothers to their children. Charlotte Delbo observing the worst. German soldiers shot these Jews and neatly filled the pits. Even murder could be aesthetic and orderly.
Watching Uri run towards the car in his white karate gi, a yellow belt tied tightly around his small waist, Isabel felt secure, even belligerent. She started the car. Bella hadn’t stood a chance. The first large-scale action of the Final Solution slammed into Kamenets-Podolski on August 27 and 28, 1941. 23,600 Jews from the ghetto massacred in two days.
