by Miryam Sivan
“Jealousy doesn’t become you, sweetheart.” Isabel laughed on purpose. Made light of the emotional connection. Protect. Pad the vulnerability.
“Not jealous. Just curious.”
“Good thing Emanuel’s not so curious.”
“He can’t be. He’s your cover.”
“My what?”
“Come on,” Zakhi said. “Help me here.”
She followed after him into the utility room off the kitchen. What were they actually saying to one another? Emanuel a cover for what? Zakhi just curious about what, why? Zakhi handed her the plans and measured from the corner to the window. She watched him work. His back muscles lengthened with the stretch of his arms pulling open the measuring tape. His shirt, smudged with dirt, had a small rip in the shoulder. His work boots were scuffed and dusty. The snap of the tape back into its case aroused her. She wanted him.
When Alon and Isabel built their house in town, the maleness of the construction site and the virility on display—manual and power tools, hand-built walls, roofs, tractors, the bobcat, the boots, the rough clothing, the concrete and plaster powder—were like erotic fairy dust for Isabel. She went every day to map the progress, which also became an exhilarating escape from her desk.
Zakhi moved along the wall. Measuring and marking. Tomorrow he would jack hammer the conduit channels. His hair, his shoulders and back, the crinkles in the skin of his hands and neck, would be covered with bits of concrete and dust. Isabel wanted to return then. To touch him amidst the rubble, feel the smooth and rough bits simultaneously. But Schine’s hunger for pages still strapped her to the desk. She looked at her watch.
“Zakhi, I’ve got to go. Prague put a dent in the production schedule. And Lia has a new boyfriend coming to dinner.”
“Love’s good for all.” Zakhi hugged her tightly and bent down to give Woody a rub.
“I’m off then.” Isabel retreated from the room. The pull of the front door at her back. “But I really want to stay.” She really wanted to stay.
“You go on already.” Zakhi reached into his pocket for his ringing phone. “Nail those mother fuckers in the Greek hills.” He looked at his phone, waved bye, and walked into the other room to take the call.
2
Isabel had little more than an hour before Emanuel’s arrival. Against his advice she would not take the day off but sat down to write. Pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages. She opened Jaim Benjamin’s file. The lines she wrote the day before leaving for Prague sounded okay. Not great but passable. A lump rose in the back of her throat. Day after day, week after week, she sat and put words down. She outlined the trajectory of events and filled in the details. She knew what she was doing. She’d done it fourteen times before. But something remained terribly off and time away did not help.
Jaim Benjamin brought her to Spain and she didn’t want to go there. Jaim Benjamin brought her to Dave Toledo, her father, dead now twenty-three years and she didn’t want to go there. Definitely not there. Her childhood one dark cloud of Dave’s moods punctuated by light family vacations in exotic and not-so-exotic beach locales, even after he left them and relocated to California. Even after he blamed Suri for their only child’s relocation to Israel. How unfair was that. But Dave had to blame someone and couldn’t very well hold history accountable.
Like a somnambulant, Isabel read again what she wrote. The neighbors brought a broken radio to Jaim. Maybe he knew how to fix it? She couldn’t work today. Closing the file she opened a new one. From memory she typed. Suri named me Isabel, after Bella, her mother, who died naked and trembling in a freshly dug pit in a Ukrainian forest clearing.
Isabel scrolled down to a new page. Because of the lump in her throat, because of Suri’s painful silence and Dave’s loud ire, she would write Bella’s story. Set out a plot line to muddle. And not some incidental hiccup. But intentionally. Deliberately. She had quite a bit of information to work with. For years she gleaned facts about Bella and the rest of Suri’s family from Zizi and Lola and from other cousins in Israel. She would connect the dots and pieces and watch a story emerge.
Isabel concentrated on the clicking of the keys. On the sound of slow typing. She kept looking at Woody and the lethargic cats. Did they know what she was doing?
“It’s not really Bella’s story,” she blurted out after a new paragraph appeared on the screen. The dog turned his eyes toward her. The cats didn’t even bother. “It’s not based on transcripts. Not even on many facts.” Woody’s eyes shifted back and forth self-consciously, showing her the whites. “My fingers are writing. Not me.” Woody closed his eyes and turned his head. Permission granted. Isabel plunged into a sea of words.
Rumor had it that Jews were being offered refuge in Madagascar. Himmler’s plan for the relocation of Europe’s Jews to Africa. Summer 1940. I managed to make it to the Black Sea and from there across Georgia to the Caspian. I travelled south through Iran to the Arabian Sea. From sea to shining sea as they say in America. From there a boat took us to the Indian Ocean where we reached Madagascar along with a few hundred Jews who seized this brief window of opportunity when expulsion was once again the solution to Europe’s Jewish Problem.
Himmler himself said: “However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and the best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.”
I took baby Sholem, my youngest, and Raizel, one of my three year old twins, and began walking east and south. Suri, already a little mother at ten, had already left Kamenets-Podolski with the rest of the children—Shiya, eight, Lola, six, and Zizi, three, the more difficult twin—and fled north and east. She had to. Without delay. Zizi threw tantrums whenever she saw a German army officer in tall black shiny boots. I received one letter since this terrible parting. My neighbor received a letter from her son. A group of youngsters from our city, Suri and the smaller children included, were together and on their way to Siberia.
I live, if it can be called living, among the monkeys and in the heat of Madagascar. A child suckles on each breast. I beg one of the men to bring me water. My husband was killed on the first day of the German occupation of our city. An example to us that a Jew didn’t have to do anything specific to be killed. His mere existence reason enough. “At which theater are you playing?” Josef K. asked the men in black before they drove a knife into his heart.
That day I stood by the table in my small kitchen peeling potatoes. Suri and Shiya helped. The smaller children slept in the living room on blankets on the floor so we could hear them easily. My brother-in-law, Dovid, came staggering in, blinded by tears, tearing hairs out of his beard.
“Dehargene, dehargene Yoskele,” Dovid mumbled in Yiddish. They killed him, they killed Yoskele, and collapsed on the floor. Within seconds, the kitchen filled with people, reviving Dovid, reviving me who fell beside him. Suri carefully put the knives away. She wrapped the potatoes in a cloth so they wouldn’t brown. She took Shiya to the other room where she made him read his Hebrew letters out loud. The twins woke first. Raizel and Zizi. With their large green eyes they toddled over to Suri and asked why so many people were in the house. Suri told them that Tati had an accident and everyone was sad. Zizi, not one for holding in her suspicions nor her pain, began screaming at the top of her lungs that she wanted Tati and no one else. I heard my baby cry and ran into the living room. I took her in my arms, gave her a breast full of milk and told her not to worry, that Tati would be with us again one day in Gan Eden.
Isabel closed the file and the computer. She was writing the history that was. She was writing the history that wasn’t. She saw herself reflected in the turned off black computer screen. A Spanish-Ukrainian-American Jew in Israel. A child of a war refugee seeking refuge in words. A ghost in her own story.
The backdrop of silence that choked her parents’ lives threatened her own. But
she would have none of it. She would talk and tell and listen and see. She would ghost and ghost until the contours of story and self filled with form, light, and color. Suri could criticize and run but she could not hide. After Isabel’s third book, written for a woman who had fled Lithuania and found asylum in Shanghai, Suri ambushed her daughter. She had come to Israel for a long visit after Dave’s death. Before she met Hal.
“You’re picking at wounds, Isabel. It’s unbecoming.”
Isabel defended herself gently. In those days she was very gentle with her Suri. But firm. And clear. “For the people who want to tell their stories, my words drain emotional cesspools. For them, Suri, these words have the magical power to restore life.”
“Fancy notions. Let it alone, Isabel. Let it alone.” And though Dave was already dead by then, and years earlier had abandoned them for his new life, and even though Isabel was an adult with two children of her own, Suri whisked him out of the garret. “Your father said you were too concerned with past sorrows. These books feed your morbid preoccupation. Sweetheart, why not write happy books with your wonderful talent?”
“Other families’ stories fill the empty pockets of my own,” Isabel spit out boldly, knowing even then what Molly kept saying now. And just as quickly Isabel backed down. She had hurt Suri. Saw it all over her face. This wasn’t allowed. Normal adolescent rebelliousness was not on her family’s menu. Nor the defiance of young adulthood. Isabel couldn’t tell her mother to go to hell like most of her friends did. Suri had already been there. And barely survived.
Isabel was not allowed to be hurtful but had to protect Suri above all else. Above her own pain too. For Suri’s badly sealed pain, as Nelly Sachs described it, was always on the edge of bursting forth again. So be gentle, Sachs wrote, when you teach us to live again. And Isabel was gentle. She was a child who suffered silently, who made little trouble for her mother.
But her own badly sealed pain was bursting. Now she needed to know what happened in Siberia. What could be so awful that a lifelong moratorium had been declared? What kind of secrets was Suri protecting? Who was this woman who was her mother?
Isabel stopped turning in her chair. She listened to the comforting sounds of her house. The dishwasher ran. The fan hummed. A cat purred at the edge of the desk. Woody snored lightly on the door saddle. Suddenly a loud boom shook everything. She looked up and out the window though there was nothing informative in the sky and tree tops. She kept her head tilted upwards. Senses attuned. Waited for another boom. When it came she would know it was a jet breaking the sound barrier. And if it didn’t come, then a bomb. She waited calmly. Only the sounds of domesticity persisted. The dishwasher. The fan. The animals. The phone.
“Did you hear that?” she asked Emanuel.
“What?”
“Sounded like a bomb. The whole house shook.”
“I’m still in Haifa. Nothing here.”
“Probably not a bomb then. I’ll check the news. Dinner’s at seven. Lia’s new friend Asaf’s coming.”
“The Indian one?” Emanuel asked.
“Do you mean the one she met in India, or if he’s Indian?” she teased.
“Maybe. Maybe both. Why not? Plenty of Indians to meet in India.”
They laughed. Emanuel’s sense of humor, his soul quietness, and his natural generosity made her feel good about herself. The way he seemed to unconditionally accept her. He would look at her and say simply, consistently: yes. And the latest suggestion to give up ghosting was not because he was against it, as Suri and Alon were, as Dave most certainly would have been. Emanuel just thought she was suffering. He wanted her to be happy and this gave her a great feeling of security. About herself, about him, about life in general.
There was a sudden quiet on the line. Emanuel wanted to say more. Which happened a lot lately. His words ready to launch but a lack of practice blocked them. Lucky for her.
“See you later then,” Isabel said. “I’ve got to make order in the house and start cooking.”
“Okay, love,” he said, “Later.”
Emanuel let things be. He let her be. When he irritated her she thought it was weakness and passivity. When she irritated herself, she thought it was a solid generosity. Lately she was irritated with both of them. Whenever she imagined Emanuel in her home, morning, noon, and night, she thought of Zakhi in the woods, among the stones of ancient sites, in the houses he built. She thought of men she met at bars in New York and other cities, of other adventures, of wide horizons. She had had her fill of enclosures with Alon. He had always tried to recast her into something she wasn’t. The kibbutz girlfriend. The kibbutz wife. The kibbutz member. And he actively discouraged ghosting. Not because he thought it was morbid. But because he thought she wasn’t a good enough writer to contain the pain. But Alon was mistaken. About that. About her. About a lot of things. A born pessimist. Or maybe just timidity in the face of the big world. Alon’s sights were considerably lower. Cow sheds. Fields. Small homes. His kibbutz versus Isabel’s Manhattan upbringing. For her the boundaries of the possible swept the sky.
But Emanuel was not Alon. Why not go all the way with him?
3
When Isabel came downstairs Lia was sitting on the couch with Uri. She called out a quick hello and headed to the kitchen to organize food on the counter. Uri read from Millions of Cats. They loved this book about a lonely old couple who wanted a cat. The old man ventured to the land of cats and saw, “Cats here, cats there, cats and kittens everywhere, hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” Uri laughed when he finished reading this line. His favorite. Overwhelmed by choice, the old man agreed they could all come and he led them home in a Pied Piper procession. His wife was stunned. How could they care for so many? When the old couple decided to keep only the prettiest, the cats began to war viciously. Biting, scratching, clawing, shrieking, crying. After a long while, quiet returned. The old couple ventured outside. The cats had all vanished except for one frightened rather ugly kitten. They took him in, poor little kitty, and cared for him. In no time he was healthy, beautiful, adored. Their beloved cat.
Maybe the ugly duckling redeemed appealed to Uri. Though he was anything but. Maybe the sounds and rhythms lured him: hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. Or maybe the half dozen or so cats that lived with them endeared this tale to his heart. They had two house cats: Himalayan Benny and red Luciana. The others lived in the yard. Uri liked to dance around them singing hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. He scooped up one at a time and serenaded her, but they wouldn’t follow him in a line like the cats in the book. Lia consoled him, saying they weren’t eager to go anywhere because they already had such a good home.
“Lia, Uri, can you guys please help me with dinner?”
When they came in to the kitchen, Isabel planted Uri on a high stool by the island. His job was to wash and check each lettuce leaf thoroughly for bugs. Especially close to the core. Lia made the marinade for the grilled fish. Isabel made potato salad, green salad dressing, pasta. For Uri. No doubt he would turn his nose up at all other food. He remained devoted to noodles of all shapes and red sauce.
“How did you meet your friend Asaf?” Isabel rinsed bowls and spoons.
“On a steep mountain road to Dharamkot. On my way to meditation at Tushita. I whistled and suddenly someone whistled along in perfect harmony.”
“What were you whistling?”
“Sa Li’at.”
“Ah, now that’s a surprise. That he knew a Hebrew song.”
“No, many Israelis there. But I was surprised at the loveliness and accuracy of his harmonies.” She paused.
Isabel knew that Lia thought she was trying to dampen her enthusiasm for this new man. But she wasn’t. Really she wasn’t. She didn’t mean anything by her questions and comments. She was just cu
rious. Sometimes curiosity was just that and she suddenly remembered Zakhi’s curiosity about Jiri. But truth was she was more than simply curious. She was also concerned. Lia hadn’t been so excited about a man in years. And the last time it had ended badly.
“Okay, go on.” Isabel looked at her directly to make sure she understood. She was interested in the story itself. Sans critique.
Not needing much encouragement, Lia smiled and took a deep breath. “When I turned around to see who was whistling like that I saw the most beautiful man I have ever laid eyes on. Don’t roll your eyes like that. I mean, the most beautiful for me. Not one of those Hollywood hunks you get all gooey over.”
“I do not . . .”
Uri ran around the kitchen. “Oo la la, Lia’s in love. Lia’s in love.” He made kissing noises with his lips. Then swooped down and lifted poor Woody off the floor and planted loud kisses on his head. The dog squirmed in his arms but Uri held tight. He was in love.
“I think this is the man I was born for.” Lia walked over to Isabel. Brought her face in close. “How’s that for enthusiasm Ms. Easy-does-it? Ms. Conservative in matters of the heart?”
Isabel didn’t want to squabble with Lia. Of course she was happy for her. She had basically been alone since that last boyfriend. But Isabel was also stunned by Lia’s certainty. How protective Isabel felt, but she did the only thing she could. She smiled.
“He whistled along with me for fifteen minutes. It felt like forever. A good forever.”
It took an hour to get the entire meal, the house, and Uri ready. Isabel came out of the shower and heard the doorbell. When she made her way downstairs she felt clean and recharged after a night flight and a day begun groggily at noon. Everyone was in the living room sipping one of the fruity iced cocktails Lia loved to blend up. Emanuel was on the couch playing backgammon with Uri. Lia picked dead leaves from the ficus tree. Asaf leafed through a family photo album. Woody leaned into him and received a respectable head rub.
