From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  Ariela is watching me from Nachum’s lap. She slides to the carpet and crosses to her mother.

  Tami bends stiffly to Ariela’s hurried whispers. “No, Maya can’t stay in your room with you. She’ll stay in Dov’s. You can play with her all you want before you go to bed.” Tami turns toward me. “That is, if she stays. Maybe she’d rather go home.”

  “It’s not that I want to go,” I say. “Not that at all. It’s just that Gil doesn’t think I’m staying, so—”

  Nachum responds with satisfaction. “So if that’s all, then you just call your Gil and tell him you’ll stay here for the night, and that’s the end of it.” He opens his palms in an expansive gesture, and I can see why Tami must have fallen in love with him. His eyelids crinkle at the corners and his smile has time in it to spare—it’s a broad and leisurely grin that says, Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? “It’s not every day we have a cousin from America come play with Ariela.”

  I turn to Fanya for help, but she is gazing at me benignly, as if I am a character onstage who may or may not amuse. “All right,” I hear myself say. “I’ll have to call and see, maybe. Maybe I’ll see if Gil . . .”

  Tami points to the telephone.

  I cross to the table and lift the receiver. My relatives are standing in a tight band behind me, and the warmth of their united concern undoes in an instant my resolve to leave.

  When Gil answers I speak to him in English, but they listen unabashedly all the same, and I wonder whether they understand.

  “Honey?”

  “What?” His voice is hoarse, his English tentative. I’ve woken him from a nap.

  “Who’s she talking to?” Ariela asks in Hebrew.

  “Her beau,” Fanya whispers.

  “I’m going to be staying here tonight,” I tell Gil. The English words feel feathery and buoyant in my mouth.

  “I fell asleep,” he says. “What time is it?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “You’re still at the Shachars’?”

  “Yes.” I want to linger over his English, unsteady and miraculous. It occurs to me that I can unsay what I’ve said, make my polite excuses to the Shachars and rush home to be with him.

  But Gil is speaking again, this time in Hebrew. “Never mind. Never mind, I’ve got to make some coffee and get back to work. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  For a few seconds, neither of us speaks. “I love you,” I say in Hebrew.

  From behind me there is embarrassed shifting. “Give the girl some privacy,” Fanya intones.

  Gil’s voice is faint but clear on the other end of the line. “I love you more. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Night settles into the apartment with the sound of soft church bells in the distance. Ariela leads me to her bedroom. She chatters to herself, holding dolls and stuffed animals by the legs, laying some down and picking others up and playing out conversations between them. Occasionally she places a plastic figure into my hands with great care. Lying on the floor with her chin to the tile, she addresses me without lifting her eyes from the figures in her hands. “Your mother is sick,” she tells me, her fingertips tracing ghostly patterns around her dolls’ feet. “Why don’t you come live with us?”

  “I can visit from where I live,” I assure her, but she doesn’t pay me any attention. Instead she begins a story, a long and convoluted fairy tale of young girls and an enchanted forest, a precious secret and a magic spell. The three dolls she had earlier seem to play the central roles, the shabby pink-haired one breaking character now and then to explain events for my benefit.

  When Tami calls for her to wash for bed, Ariela lets the dolls drop abruptly. Her face has become sharp and careful. Without a word to me, she stands and steps into the hall. Soon Tami’s voice rises in exhaustion against a low whine from the girl.

  “No, Ariela,” Tami is saying. “Tonight you need to try to be a big girl.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I step out of Ariela’s room. Tami nods at me distractedly. She is standing at the far end of the hallway, her back to the bathroom door. I hear Ariela calling from inside.

  “Are you there?” The girl’s voice quakes with terror.

  “I’m here,” Tami answers.

  There is a pause. Then a scramble as the door opens and Ariela, her eyes big, stands grasping the door handle. “I want it open, I want the door open,” she begs.

  Tami shakes her head. “We’re going to keep it closed this time.”

  “Open.” The girl’s face knots. I cringe against now inevitable tears.

  “In.” Tami directs Ariela back into the bathroom. “Until you finish washing.” She closes the door behind her. Then she turns to me, and smiles unconvincingly. “It’s good that you came to visit us,” she says.

  “Thank you for having me.”

  Tami nods. “I met your mother years ago. She was your age then, more or less.” She looks me over, as though startled by her own observation. “Why hasn’t she ever come back to Israel?”

  “She’s wanted to. But her work takes all her time. And money has been tight.”

  “But you’re here.”

  I feel my cheeks flood with color, although I couldn’t say whether it’s me or my mother being accused. “I worked and saved money,” I explain quickly. “My mother helped, too. She’d been saving money for a trip herself. She was going to come, this summer.”

  “But then her cancer came back?” Tami says flatly.

  “She’s feeling much better now.”

  From behind the closed door comes a faint quaver. “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. You know I’m here. Can’t you hear me talking to your cousin Maya?”

  “Ima, keep the door open.”

  “We have a guest here, Ariela.”

  I find myself wondering what Nachum ever saw in Tami. “It’s okay,” I say. “Really.”

  “It’s just since the last war.” Tami indicates the closed bathroom door with a backhanded gesture. “She doesn’t like being shut in.”

  “It’s okay,” I say again. “I don’t mind if she keeps the door open.”

  Tami seems not to have heard me.

  “Actually, my mother will probably visit Israel next year,” I tell her. But my words are made senseless by a whimpering from the bathroom. Ariela is at the door, and then she is somehow out the door and in the hallway, her shorts around her knees and her face streaked with tears.

  Anger flashes across Tami’s face, and she turns away from the girl. “It’s impossible to do anything with her.”

  “I don’t mind, really, she can—”

  “She has to learn,” Tami says matter-of-factly, and I think she’s going to shove Ariela back into the bathroom right away. But I see that she allows her to cling to her knee for a moment in silence before steering her back inside. Ariela goes quietly now, and Tami shuts the door behind her softly.

  “Earlier you were explaining your plans . . .” Tami begins, but she seems uneasy.

  “I’m going to spend the summer traveling around the country, and then I’m going to enroll for fall courses here. At first I was just going to come to Israel for one semester, but I’ve changed my plans. I want to study more, see things.” I’m echoing what I wrote in a letter to my mother today, and the sound of my own resolve pleases me.

  “I’m right here waiting for you,” Tami says to the door behind her. Her words sound awkward, and apologetic. She turns back to me. “That’s very interesting. What you just said, about your plans.”

  Ariela is knocking at the door to be let out. She stands in the doorway, sniffling. Although she can’t speak, it’s clear that she’s proud.

  “See, it wasn’t so bad,” Tami says quickly, and steps away from the door, but not before Ariela has reached for her mother’s hand. Taken by surprise, Tami pulls away for an instant before catching herself and allowing the girl to slip a hand into hers.

  “Go get changed for bed,” Tami says after a minute. She seems bewild
ered. We watch Ariela shuffle to her room.

  Something in what I’ve just seen roots me where I stand; I feel an urgent need to explain it to Tami, although I can’t think how. “She really loves you,” I say at last.

  Tami stares at me, and the expression on her face is almost hopeful. It’s the first time that I’ve seen her animated, and it makes me wonder whether this unfriendly cousin of my mother’s doesn’t have some soft spot, after all.

  Then Tami is shaking her head. “She loves me because I’m her mother.” In her voice is a tide of bitterness. Still, her expression retains some eagerness, and when she enters Ariela’s room she touches the girl on the forehead, gingerly, as if unaccustomed to the gesture.

  When, at last, Ariela goes to sleep, it is only because I have agreed to sit with her. Her bed is low and narrow, and a nightlight sheds a watery glow on a fan-shaped section of floor. Ariela speaks in a whisper, picking up and dropping the dolls that are too many for her hands as she glides them across the bedcovers. She knows each by feel, gauges its shape and heft in the dark. I want to reach out myself and take her hand as she lies in bed, assure her that everything is going to be all right. But I sit with my arms to my sides. “Why don’t you come live with us,” she says to me as she twines her fingers in a doll’s stiff hair. She coos and sighs the dolls to sleep.

  He is thin. Alone, he climbs these stairs with sketchbook open. Past my apartment door. A shirt hangs loose from his wide shoulders, veins offer themselves on his arms. And in his unknowing hands, secrets of old and young.

  Drawings, he carries. Charcoal outlines, figures that blur one into the next. The face of a yeshiva student, filling the paper. Drawings, more drawings, he turns page upon page. There is no need for me to shut the door as he passes, so close I could touch a shoulder. This redheaded adam’s-apple boyfriend does not look at me, and when he does he will not see. He knows how not to notice what does not interest him and so I can look until I am sated.

  Black by black, haunted face by haunted face. I see he draws this neighborhood. Pale boys and gaunt elders, charcoal-black eyes. Charcoal eyes, smoke-lit faces, figures dissolve to ash at the edge of his page. He does not understand, still he draws and will not rest.

  After he has passed I whisper into my dark room what I know.

  They died in a flurry of words, the blacks. Praying to their east, their precious east, praying to the east side of the camp at sunset sunrise: to smokestacks. Whispering psalms while they worked sorting machine parts and golden jewelry, children’s clothing. They never fit on this earth. Even among us they did not belong. In uniforms, even, heads shaved and no kerchiefs on the women, you could see which were the ones.

  Mother always told me. The blacks are different. They’re not like you and me. Primitive people. Simple like children and dangerous. People keeping once upon a time, yes, a packed suitcase beside the door, in case in the middle of the night the messiah. And the family would be ready. People who refused to belong, could not belong like everyone else. Could not see, they were a public spectacle earning the rest of us the revulsion of passersby. Mother hated the blacks, she said.

  No one could touch the blacks. No one. Not even then, not even in camp. Wearing their sorrow like a shield, saying their mourning prayers before we even had a chance to die. Holding the world at bay with their precious faith. One could not touch them, one cannot touch them, even this very moment they escape understanding, their swirling gestures fade to dusk on the margins of a page.

  And this redheaded boy. Trying to fix them with his charcoal as if he could capture what no one can. Above my head, he jingles keys. A door opens and shuts, he treads the length of the apartment, drops kitchen things and curses. He is a knotted branch, a broken child. When the American returns he will rain his own devotion on her pale American skin, he will punish her love of him. Again there will be cries and silence, she will stumble before his small fury.

  Such fury as cannot frighten me.

  How they died like faithful servants, humming the story of their own sorrow. A line of them. A breeze, the shine of leaves rippling on trees past the fences. The sky clear blue high over camp. And one, waiting at the end of the line for death, looking back at me and saying, nothing.

  I could not turn my eyes from his.

  Mother, you were gone already, you could not have seen the slow-burning cinder of his gaze.

  Evening passes. I sit beside the door until long after dark. My back is stiff, my knees bruise against the suitcase beside the stool. I am a waiting American footsteps. For now that she has revealed her secret, I will unravel my own for her sake. I will prepare for the day of her triumph, every story I will lay at her feet.

  When I slide down to the floor it is night. I am faint from hunger.

  Oh Lilka. How you would have cried.

  Tami is waiting for me when I step, blinking, into the hallway. “I’ve set up Dov’s room for you,” she says.

  I go to the door Tami indicates. Inside are a single bed, a small desk, a wall hung with magazine clippings that I cannot make out in the dim light from the hall. The room feels shadowy and cavernous until Tami reaches behind me to flip a switch. Jolted into light, the room is stark, its four walls confining.

  She indicates the towels and T-shirt folded at the foot of the made-up bed. “If there’s anything else you need, let me know.”

  “Thank you.” I stand in the center of her son’s room and wait for her to go. Still she lingers in the doorway, until I’m convinced there’s something she’d like to ask me.

  “Good night,” she says, finally.

  As soon as she’s gone, I close the door. Then I turn off the lights. I like the room better this way. In the dark the space expands once more, and as I undress, each shadow gradually transforms itself into an identifiable object.

  The T-shirt is a soft, worn cotton and must belong to Tami. I pull it over my head, noticing how the fabric has stretched to the shape of a body different from mine. Crawling between the sheets, I dip my feet to the cool perimeter of the bed and realize that this is the first night I’ve slept alone in months. Gil, I imagine, is still working. He’ll work until he’s so tired he thinks he can defeat his insomnia. If this is a good night he’ll fall asleep quickly, his breath slow and even.

  I think I can picture your apartment almost perfectly now, my mother wrote in her last letter. It sounds beautiful.

  With one fingertip. I trace a circle on my cheek. I press lightly here and there, confirming what I know—it isn’t tender any longer. Although the mark has almost disappeared, I’ve been careful to apply makeup several times each day. Recalling Fanya’s scrutiny of my features, I’m grateful for my vigilance. I complete my exploration of the curve of my cheekbone and find nothing amiss. The smoothness of the healed skin is comforting, yet it makes me uneasy as well.

  The air is still, and a mosquito whines nearby, dipping closer every few minutes. One window, across the room, is partially open. A strip of tape, I now notice, hangs from its frame; I imagine someone starting to peel it away but becoming absentminded. The other window is sealed on all sides. The tape glints in the moonlight, and I sit up to look. This was the Shachars’ “Saddam-proof” room, Fanya explained to me, where the family slept during the SCUD attacks two winters ago. I examine the shadowed furniture with renewed interest. It occurs to me to wonder why Nachum and Tami haven’t bothered to unseal the windows. Although I know Gil would laugh at me for this foolishness, I tell myself: It’s as if someone still lives here, secretive and quiet, awaiting the next war.

  Or maybe, like people back home who leave Christmas lights up until spring, the Shachars just stopped noticing the tape on the windows.

  I’m ashamed at this thought, and recall what Nachum said about Americans and our easy lives.

  Back in Purchase, I watched the escalation of the crisis on television, each broadcast heralded by the station’s bold Persian Gulf logo and musical motif. The war we watched from my dormitory lounge was ungainly,
a rough and poorly timed pageant of gas masks, missiles, an Israeli spokesman with his head held high. And then stretches of empty sky as the camera wavered and dipped, and the American newscaster, nervous as a schoolboy on his rooftop halfway around the world, speculated to fill airtime until the next missile.

  Over the telephone, my mother’s voice was tense with worry. “I want to be there,” she said. “I want to be with the family there.”

  It was my first year of college, and although I’d been watching the broadcasts with an oddly personal dread, I found myself impatient with my mother’s praise of brave Israel and all its hardships. In just one phone call, her dedication to Israel undermined any connection I might feel—as though she and I were rivals staking out loyalties, and first dibs trumped all. “What would you accomplish by running off to Israel?” I challenged her. “It’s not like you could win the war for them.”

  During the silence that followed, I realized that I sounded jealous.

  “You don’t understand the way I feel about these things,” she said. “You’re just like your father, you know.” I held the receiver loosely, recognizing it for the foreign object it was; why didn’t I just put it down, instead of holding it to my ear as my mother continued? Anger hollowed my head and filled it with static. “That’s just fine. I don’t ask you to understand, Maya. Only don’t pretend you do if you don’t.”

  Watching the war at parties, at late-night pizza study sessions, and even at dinner when the resident advisor wheeled a television set into the cafeteria, I grew irritated at the newscaster’s uneasy repetitions and the camera operator’s unsteady hand. Under that explosion-lit sky were relatives I’d never met, places my mother had tried to tell me about. I saw a report showing sealed rooms and children with gas masks, and the pride I felt was shot through with resentment at those curving streets and drowsy children for being a part of the world my mother knew I wasn’t cut out for. “It’s crazy to live like that,” someone said. Silently I agreed.

  Around that time, during one of our brief twice-monthly conversations, my father asked as usual after my mother. Someone had sent him a clipping of a newspaper article about her work. The writer had made the usual big deal over her name, titling the article “Hope for the Hopeless.” My mother had made some good points in the interview, my father conceded. And, he said, he was fond of the part where she called the city planners Neanderthals.