From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  In a room above mine, in the part of the building not owned by the Center, a radio played. All night, music and Christian sermons continued, soft but insistent as the snores from the radio’s owner. I strained to make out the words, telling me when danger was near, when salvation was due, how hard was the struggle of those who worked toward that day.

  At six o’clock, when my mother came into the kitchen, I had her coffee waiting on the table, I put the sugar bowl in front of her as she sat down.

  She looked at it, then at me, with annoyance. “This doesn’t change anything, Maya,” she said.

  “It changes everything.”

  “No.” She shook her head fiercely. “You listen to me. You listen to me good just this once. This changes nothing.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You and I have our differences. But even if you’d known earlier, you still couldn’t have done a thing to help. So don’t tire us both out with torturing yourself for not guessing sooner. And don’t trouble me by deciding all of a sudden to be involved in my life, simply because I’ve got a struggle ahead. I’ve beaten this before and I’ll beat it again. You just take care of yourself, and I’ll take care of myself.”

  She gripped the sugar bowl in both hands. “Do you understand me?”

  My cheeks burned with shame. Even my guilt was dismissed in advance, my worry preempted. There was nothing I could say. I sat across the table from her, a hundred miles away.

  “Does Dad know?” I asked.

  “Why on earth would he need to know? That was another age, Maya. We don’t speak anymore, I don’t even know his address. Listen, I don’t need his help or anyone’s. I’ll be fine.”

  She sipped her coffee. Sitting back in her jeans and pressed navy blouse, a small red ribbon pinned to her lapel, she waited for my reply.

  My voice was clotted with anger. “I heard you.”

  She arched her eyebrows: a single gesture binding our agreement.

  After she went downstairs, I sat at the kitchen table for a long while.

  A shawl of sunburn is draped around my bare shoulders. The reddened skin is hot when I press my cheek to it, and the bag of cucumbers resting against my leg is fogged.

  I unfold my mother’s letter one last time and reread in disbelief.

  I’ve fooled her.

  Once I’d signed up for a semester in Israel, I waited for my mother’s scorn. I knew she would accuse me of turning over this new leaf all for her sake. She would label my sudden interest in the local synagogue’s Hebrew classes just a sorry attempt to please her, she would scoff at the nights I stayed home from parties so I could pore over vocabulary lists. I could almost hear her telling me not to bother. Anticipating her disdain, I vented my fury in front of my dorm room mirror. Can’t you believe just for once that I’m capable of doing something for reasons of my own? Maybe I’ve always wanted to go to Israel. Maybe I did actually listen in Hebrew school, maybe I’m curious about what I hear on the news. Maybe I want to go.

  Why, I asked the mirror, does everything have to be about you?

  Privately I didn’t search my reasons. I filled out the forms, I sweated over my Hebrew homework, and I got busy making what Ina—miffed when the extra shifts I took at Sly’s Pizzeria to save for my travels left little time for her—mocked as the World’s Most Compulsive Packing List.

  My mother never challenged me. She said only that she was pleased at this “new sense of purpose” in my life. Boiling with unused replies, I could only accept her praise with a tight nod.

  I stand at the top of the Promenade, munching on a cucumber. My mother was right on at least one point, I think. I turn down the hill toward home. A new country is a new start. Here I am in Israel, doing the very thing she always wanted to do. And letter by laborious letter, I’m giving it all to her. For once, I’m proud of myself. It’s a strange, giddy feeling.

  From now on, I promise myself, I will travel. I will visit my mother’s relatives, ask them questions, learn the country by heart. I’ll capture the feeling the bright winding streets of Jerusalem give me, but not in the words of some anonymous brochure writer. I vow to see Israel through my own eyes, make true the lies I’ve told in my letters and redeem them a thousandfold. I’ll be the American who sees it all, who isn’t just a tourist but instead takes the time to understand.

  And then I won’t even need to lie in my letters anymore. Why did I ever think I needed to lie?

  6

  It is early in the evening when one of the blacks comes to my door, a young man. I have heard him climbing the steps, knocking on door after door. Speaking to the boy downstairs, to the woman next door, to the neighbor across the landing. I watch him coming.

  He has scarcely touched his knuckles to my door when I have opened it, opened it only a crack. He peers in at me sitting on my stool beside the door and when he sees me watching he smiles. He has a paleface. He is asking for alms for students. For poor brides, to help them buy wedding dresses, he tells me.

  I scowl at him. Does he not see I have more important matters at hand? Does he not see I must be vigilant and not distracted? For the American has returned to her perch once again, she has climbed the steps and I must listen with all my strength.

  He waits for my answer, this boy of swirling sidelocks. He thinks I am one of them, one of the blacks, with my head tied in a kerchief as their women do to hide their hair. But modesty is not my purpose. “I don’t believe in you,” I say to him. I spit at his feet. The gob lands on the tiles between us. He is astonished, then frightened. His eyes wobble with his fear. He stares at me through the opening in the door, then tries to see beyond me into the dark of my apartment.

  “You must go up,” I tell him. “You must climb the stairs. Don’t you know there is an American upstairs?” He does not move. “Americans have money,” I persuade him. I close the door further, so that he must lean forward to see my face through the narrow opening. “Go to the American,” I whisper to him. “Americans are salvation, Americans are death. Go.”

  He leaves me, he climbs and his ankles have already vanished from view when I call to him. “The messiah is coming.”

  “Yes,” he answers. “We must be ready.”

  July 10, 1993

  Dear Mom,

  How are you? Classes are fine. The new apartment is terrific. You don’t need to worry, I have plenty of friends here. Things with Gil are terrific.

  Gil and I continue to speak only Hebrew at home. Gil does know some English, of course. He even reads books in English. But we both think it’s better this way.

  I lift my pen to evaluate the words on the page. I’m keeping the promise I made on the Promenade. I’m writing the truth, with no embellishments.

  Yesterday when I came into the apartment, the heat pressing on the roof overhead, Gil was home. Beside the door were his sandals, and I heard the rustle of his newspaper from the kitchen. As I kicked off my sandals on top of his, I glanced into the living room and saw a rectangular shape above the window. Before I could stop myself I blurted in English, “What the hell is that?”

  “Hebrew,” Gil called from the kitchen.

  I went to the doorway. Gil was sitting at the table, sections of newspaper discarded by his feet. “The gallery closed early today,” he explained, and turned a page.

  Gesturing in the direction of the living room, I asked again, in Hebrew. This time my voice was thm and uncertain. “What is that? Over the window in the living room.”

  “What does it look like?”

  I crossed the narrow hallway and took a few steps into the living room.

  A shadowed yellow sign, with a red sunrise and black lettering, rested atop the window frame. Its message was angled toward the sofa and chairs below.

  Gil’s words curled and teased from the kitchen. “I thought it was what we needed to round out our decor.”

  “Gil?” I was having trouble finding the words I wanted in Hebrew. “Why did you bring one of their signs in here?”

&
nbsp; “Because it’s funny. Don’t you think so? Besides, shouldn’t we have a sign to welcome the Messiah, too? Just in case he decides to show.”

  I paused only long enough to read the lettering on the sign once more; then I heard myself speaking English. “Don’t you care whether it bothers me, whether I want one of their signs in here? I can’t even walk down the street in shorts without getting nasty looks from those people.”

  “Sorry?” He laughed. “What was that? I didn’t quite catch it.”

  In the living room, the breeze carried the sun-filled curtains toward me, and away. “Fine. Hebrew.” I took a careful breath and tried to remember what I’d wanted to say. “But Gil,” I said at last in Hebrew. “‘Prepare for the coming of the Messiah.’ Doesn’t it—I don’t know—annoy you?”

  When he didn’t answer, I went to the kitchen door. Gil had pushed back his chair. He sat with both feet planted on the floor, as if poised to spring, yet he seemed absorbed in the newsprint that partly shielded his face. “I like it, Maya. ‘Prepare for the coming of the Messiah.’ Why not? Besides”—he regarded me over the top of the newspaper, and there was something dangerous in his expression—“I live here. I can hang a sign on the wall if I like.”

  That was yesterday. This afternoon Gil is at the gallery, and I’m home alone as usual, on the balcony.

  My Hebrew is really improving. I add the next true sentence to my letter.

  But how to explain that it makes me uneasy, this living with Gil in a language that still sounds to me at times like a low blur? How to explain that I don’t trust my ears to tell me what he says, and don’t trust myself to say exactly what I mean. “Gil’s my hero,” I kidded once in front of a co-worker of his we met on the street, after explaining how I made Gil change the apartment’s light bulbs because, even standing on a chair, I was too short to reach the fixtures. That evening, Gil looked stonily past me until I was sure my very existence irked him. I had to beg him to tell me what was wrong.

  “Did you want to make me look like a fool, Maya? You’re doing a pretty terrific job.”

  The next day I looked up what I’d said in the dictionary; I even repeated my words to Michal after class. “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” she told me. “Are you sure he wasn’t overreacting to something?”

  “I don’t know. I think I must have made some mistake.”

  “Have other boyfriends been so picky about everything you say?”

  “It’s not like I’ve had so many boyfriends. I mean, not any real boyfriends, you know?”

  She gathered her books and turned for the door. “It sounds to me like his mistake, not yours.”

  It’s the language, Mom, I want to write. I don’t know how to live in it.

  But my mother’s new trust in me is a fragile thing. So for now, I’ll skip that part. I’ll move on to another subject. I am keeping my promise, I assure myself—I’m writing the truth. Only, not too much truth. A little at a time.

  The sun is hot on the back of my neck, and the yellow signs dangling over the street reflect the glare; it’s impossible to look at them. I write a stream of words.

  The old woman downstairs is still a mystery. I think she’s lonely, or confused. In any case, she’s certainly not eager for company. So many times I’ve thought I was finally going to get a good look at her, but no luck yet.

  There is a knock on the door. I drop pen and pad, and run barefoot through the living room and into the entryway.

  “Who is it?” I ask in English, without thinking. There is no answer. “Who’s there?” I say in Hebrew.

  A man’s voice answers me in Yiddish.

  The building is so quiet it seems to me that the owner of this voice and I must be the only two people here. “I’m sorry,” I say in Hebrew. “I don’t understand. Who is it?”

  There is a pause. “A poor Jew,” the man answers in heavy Hebrew.

  Standing on tiptoe, I look through the peephole. Less than a foot from me on the other side of the door stands a black, pale-faced and skinny. He speaks in a rapid, rasping voice. “Can you open the door?”

  My heart jumps in my chest. I try to calm its pounding with reasonable words. “What is it you want?”

  Once again he enunciates: “It’s a poor Jew.”

  The statement sounds ritualistic—a password to which I am supposed to know the response. My visitor stands expectant in the dark-rimmed circle of the peephole, his face widened by the curving glass so that his features jut out at me. My view of him trembles and bobbles; I steady my balance against the door.

  “A poor Jew,” he elaborates, “waiting for the Messiah. Can you open the door?”

  Despite the alarming distortion of his face, he looks timid, and I realize that he is my age or even younger. It occurs to me that he’s probably being set up for marriage. I picture a matchmaker knocking on door after door throughout the land, searching high and low for a girl with goggle eyes and a bulging forehead.

  He clears his throat, and I can see that he’s puzzled. Then he begins speaking to the closed door of my apartment, as though willing to pretend for the moment that I’ve opened it and invited him in.

  “I am collecting money,” he says. “For poor Jewish brides and students. For the community.”

  I know that my American instinct not to open the door to a stranger is out of place here in this sleepy Jerusalem valley. I know that he couldn’t harm me; his wrists are as thin as mine. In his ill-fitting black outfit, he looks like a crow. He looks like a college student who’s raided the costume collection of a museum. He looks Amish, with exuberant sideburns. What am I afraid of? Some secret incantation known only to the ultra-religious, some deadly curse?

  I don’t open the door. “Sorry,” I say. “I can’t.”

  “You don’t have any money?” he asks, peevish now.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  “You can’t open the door to hear the request of a poor Jew?” He speaks deliberately, and all at once he seems far older than I, and invested after all with authority. Disapproval furrows his bulbous forehead. I half expect a bolt of lightning. “Of a poor Jew. Waiting for the Messiah. That he should only come soon.”

  I say nothing. I breathe quietly and wait for him to think I’ve gone away from the door.

  At last, after what seems an eternity, he turns and starts down the stairs. He sets a bony hand on the railing, then pauses to look at the closed door. “Wretched person,” he mutters.

  I back away from the door. My head is light, and a tight circle around my eye aches where I pressed against the peephole. My vision swims, as if I’ve been crying.

  Wretched person, he called her. Wretched American, wretched girl, wretched brown-haired American girl, he called her. And tonight I dream of Americans, tens of Americans, brown-haired, and black-haired, yellow-haired too. They are all talking at once, and they speak words that I do not understand but that always mean the same thing: Prepare. Shifra, they call, and I wonder how they know my name.

  When I wake my covers are wet with sweat and chafe my ankles and wrists. I sit on the edge of my bed. There is a wailing of cats from outside and a refrigerator hum from the kitchen. I am breathing like a heaving thing, like a train engine.

  My room is small and close, and now it is inhabited by Americans. Americans flitting beneath the sofa across the dark floor, Americans slipping in and out of the slats of the shutters. They murmur, talking to one another, to me. Shifra. It is nearly dawn when they leave me, and I sit in my apartment alone.

  After camp, after the years when I knew only how to be looked at by no one, it was the Americans who looked at me. The Americans looked at me and saw I was a dry, brittle thing, they looked at me and knew I was a burnt remnant, a shard. And then, after they liberated the camp.

  After they liberated the camp, then.

  A wailing of cats in this Jerusalem morning, a refrigerator hum, a bee buzzing in my brain.

  And when they took us to the refugee center. “We’ll
make you whole again,” the yellow-haired soldier said, and repeated it to the line streaming past him. “We’ll make you whole.” I heard him telling it to the procession coming through the gates until he was hoarse.

  Only the Americans can make things whole. Only the Americans can bring redemption.

  Oh the blacks think they know. Prepare, the blacks say. Prepare. I scoff at them, they that bounce back and forth with their black hats and their prayers for their messiah. They that pray for their white-donkeyed salvation that must come here to Jerusalem and trumpet a turd on the streets. Signs, they say there are. Signs of the coming. I scoff at their signs.

  I have seen signs, heard them. On my own. I Have heard the wind blowing the sound of rain in the palm tree. I have heard the sighing and soughing of an American in the breeze.

  Above me, the American creeps mildly about her tasks. With a crumpling of paper she rumples my thoughts. With the whisk of a broom she sweeps cobwebs from my mind. She delays, tests my patience.

  She has tricked the blacks, she has tricked them all only she cannot hide her secret from me. The blacks think the salvation will be a red rising sun but they are merely fools, for the sun will not bring the answer. The sun brings stabbing pains in the head, only. Nothing more. For the salvation they must listen. Listen for the sound of rain to free us from this burning life. For the sound of foreign footsteps, in the stairwell.

  Descending, rising.

  I listen to the American and I ready myself. Soon, soon, she will give a first sign and I will know for certain what I suspect. She has come for me. For all of us, she has come.

  I wait for the one who will make things whole.

  When I emerge from class, Michal is sitting on a windowsill in the hallway. Her hair is tousled and she wears sweatpants. She waves me over.